Michael S. Eggert, M.D., discusses the complex field of pulmonary and critical medicine, what led him into this field, and how the treatment of PAH is evolving.
My name is Michael Eggert. Um I am on the staff of Sentara Heart Hospital in Sentara Norfolk General, where I'm in the practice of pulmonary and critical care medicine, I have the privilege of being the medical director of the pulmonary hypertension program here at Sentara Heart Hospital. Our initial certification was in 2017 and we expect re certification shortly. Uh this I have been practicing with a special focus on pulmonary hypertension since 2004. I came out of fellowship with a broad array of training but wasn't sure where I wanted to specialize, but I met a young patient with pulmonary hypertension at the end of 2003 and 2004, a young woman who had been misdiagnosed as having asthma as a reason for ending up in the hospital with pneumonia followed. Uh that was followed by my own episode of pulmonary embolism or blood clot in the lungs, followed by that prior patients father's presentation with pulmonary hypertension. All three of these presentations are related and made me believe that I was actually called to serve the community in the context of taking care of the blood vessels in the lungs of the pulmonary vasculature. And when they go wrong as in pulmonary hypertension, the way I approach my patients is kind of seeing them as one of two things either as a really difficult to solve puzzle or a wonderfully multicolored ball of twine. If you go with the puzzle analogy, I'd like to put all the pieces into place, recognizing that the pieces shouldn't be forced and you need to create a complete picture of the situation from a clinical standpoint, from a personal standpoint from a social standpoint and if you take the ball of twine analogy um is trying to separate out each of the small strands of color to identify all the contributions, either clinically or non clinically to the patient's illness. I came to Sentara in 2002 after practicing at another hospital and with another system in the region for a year prior to coming here, um I had transferred patients from that system to Sentara in the year that I practiced elsewhere and was deeply impressed by the intellect and the skill of the doctors at Sentara and knew that I wanted to serve a broader patient population as well as a broader catchment area. Um since coming to Sentara, I've come to deeply respect its service to its medically indigent population as well as the underserved in eastern, southeastern Virginia and northeastern north Carolina. In addition to seeing the breadth of pathology we see here, I would challenge any academic medical center to see either the breadth of the patients that we see or the acuity in which we, the acuity of the condition in which we see them pulmonary hypertension has been treated along two or three pathways that seem to make the disease worse for a number of years recently, Sentara has become part of a multi center clinical trial to establish treatment for a new fourth pathway. uh, the blocking of which appears to show substantial promise in animal models of pulmonary hypertension, as well as to be safe and effective for a small population of pulmonary hypertension patients. Sentara is now part of the key study to validate these findings in a much larger population of pulmonary hypertension patients.
BROADCASTMED