Meet Vascular Surgeon, Samuel N. Steerman, M.D., as he discusses his areas of interest, his path to medicine, and what brought him to Sentara. Dr. Steerman also speaks to the new and evolving treatments for Peripheral Artery Disease.
Hello, I'm Sam Stearman. I'm a vascular surgeon with Cento vascular specialist, primarily based on the South side at Virginia Beach General Hospital. As vascular specialists, we work all over the body with different sorts of disease processes. And we used to be called vascular surgeons. But now as vascular specialists, we've rebranded ourselves because we do more than operate. We treat people with medicine. We treat people with minimally invasive means and also open surgery as well. Peripheral artery disease is a main disease that we treat, but we also treat aneurysms carotid disease and also take care of dialysis access for the dialysis population. So my father is a general surgeon. So I had exposure to medicine from a very young age and even went in for some trauma cases during high school. Uh Since then, I did a lot of my medical training in the Philadelphia area. And after becoming a general surgeon going through that residency, I heard about all this really advanced vascular surgery that was being done in Norfolk, Virginia and decided to come down to Norfolk for just two years just for a fellowship program. Um And that was in 2011 since then. Um, we've, uh, we've made friends here. My kids are in school and, uh, we've really made Virginia Beach and Norfolk our home, really enjoy the practice here, taking care of the patients, um, and anticipate spending a long time here for the future. My experience at Centa has been really fantastic for my patients. We besides being able to use open surgery as well as medicine for treating patients. We've had access to cutting edge technology to be able to treat patients just as well as any other hospital throughout the country. My approach to patient care is to do as much as necessary, but also as little as possible in the patients where it's appropriate. Open surgery is a great option to be able to take care of some severe problems. But in many patients, physical therapy or medicine or even some lifestyle changes is really the ideal treatment pattern. And I love to use that if we're able to, to avoid bigger operations, the treatment of peripheral artery disease has evolved immensely over the past several decades and we have more physical therapy options, vascular rehab options for these patients as well as the balloons and stents that we've been using for years. We have the, the fall back of open surgery, which is a great operation when it needs to be done. But we have new technology where we're able to do a bypass without making an incision on a leg. So someone who has a blockage in their leg that's not able to be treated with a balloon or a stent. We have the ability to bypass around that area of blockage without making an incision on the body. And that's something new and exciting that we're able to treat our patients with here at Centa.
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