I spent a lot of my time on the university faculty in trouble for something. In the early 1990s I started worrying about the morbidity and mortality rates of my patients who were going for peripheral bypass surgery. We used to say, “Fem-pop, chop-chop, hop-hop.” The vascular surgeons weren’t doing endovascular work at my institution but the cardiologists were. So I started sending all my elderly patients to the invasive cardiologists. In fact in 1993 we showed that after endovascular revascularization, if their TCOMs went up 30 mmHg, they healed their wounds so we could use TCOM as a predictor of success.
I stopped sending any patients to the surgeons unless cardiology told me they couldn’t help them. The surgeons told me that I wasn’t doing the right thing because those stents would only stay open 3 to 5 years. But that’s about how long those patients expected to live. And now endovascular revascularization is considered the standard of care. And nowadays, all the vascular surgeons are trained in endovascular work.
Dr. Fife is a world renowned wound care physician dedicated to improving patient outcomes through quality driven care. Please visit my blog at CarolineFifeMD.com and my Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/carolinefifemd/videos
The opinions, comments, and content expressed or implied in my statements are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the position or views of Intellicure or any of the boards on which I serve.
