SVMC cardiology

 

 

STRIVING TO IMPROVE YOUR LIFE ONE BEAT AT A TIME

You get one life and you get one heart. The board-certified cardiologists and associated practitioners at SVMC Cardiology are committed to helping you make the most of both.

Our patient-centered approach to care and personalized care plans maximize your quality of life while delivering the treatment you need when you need it.

Creating the appropriate treatment plan for your condition begins with a cardiac consultation. Your consultation is a chance for you to share your health history and current concerns with your cardiologist. All necessary exams and tests are conducted on-site by your cardiac care team. The results are shared and discussed directly with you so that you fully understand your condition, treatment options, associated risks, and potential lifestyle changes.

After a heart episode or surgery, there’s nothing our cardiac team and you want more than for you to just get back on your feet and live the life you want. That’s why we begin your rehabilitation program before you even leave the hospital. Through a combination of education and exercise, your personalized program will help you build strength and reduce your risk factors. Using the full range of cardio equipment in our Cardiac Rehab Center and under the watchful eye of our rehab team, you’ll improve your heart’s strength and capacity and get closer to resuming a full and active lifestyle. For more information about Cardiac Rehabilitation, click here.

In order to understand how well your heart is or isn’t functioning, an echocardiogram may be performed. This non-invasive procedure uses sound waves to produce images of your heart. Both of SVMC’s cardiologists are board certified in echocardiography and able to observe how your heart is pumping and identify any abnormalities in the heart muscle or valves. An echocardiogram allows our team to make the most informed and appropriate recommendations for the next steps in your care.

If a standard echocardiogram does not provide a clear image of your heart, your SVMC care team may recommend a transesophageal echocardiogram or TEE. Performed at the hospital, this procedure involves inserting a flexible tube containing a transducer down your throat and into your esophagus. From this closer vantage point, the transducer then uses sound waves to create more detailed images of your heart and allows for better diagnosis.

Before we treat your heart, we need understand how it’s performing. At SVMC we offer a number of non-invasive stress tests that can quickly and easily reveal a number of things including: how well your heart works during increasing levels of activity; how certain medications are impacting blood flow; the effectiveness of procedures done to improve heart performance; and more.

If you have risk factors for heart disease, calcium scoring may may help you learn more about whether you are actually at risk. The non-invasive test uses high-speed CT imaging technology to measure the hardening of the heart’s arteries, a leading indicator of heart disease and heart attacks. Visit the calcium scoring page for complete details. 

A pacemaker is one of the most effective ways to ensure a heart maintains a steady, healthy beat. The SVMC cardiac team is exceptionally skilled and experienced at both pacemaker implantation and monitoring. Considered a minor surgery, implantation takes place at the hospital with most patients returning to normal activity (and a more steadily beating heart) within a few days. Like all medical equipment, pacemakers need a little TLC every now and then. At SVMC our cardiac team can perform routine monitoring, both remotely and in the office, and reprogramming as needed.

One of the most common cardiac diagnostic tools, an EKG is a painless way to check for problems with the electrical activity of your heart. The EKG translates and records your heart’s electrical activity over a period of time and translates it into waves. Your SVMC care provider can use printouts of the waves to detect any patterns that might point to a specific condition and put together a treatment plan that meets your specific needs.

Should your SVMC cardiac care provider want to monitor your heart over a longer period of time than is practical for a standard EKG, you may be given a Holter or event monitor. Worn outside the body and completely painless, monitors are helpful in detecting abnormalities that only happen occasionally and can help your doctor link any abnormalities to specific activities or events in your day.

Carotid ultrasound
At SVMC our goal is to treat your health issues before they become problems. Using our sophisticated carotid ultrasound test, your cardiac care provider can detect blockages in your neck arteries that could lead to a stroke or indicate problems in other parts or your circulatory system.

Education
Because understanding what causes heart problems is essential to resolving them, we offer a variety of educational resources to patients and their families.  Workshops are offered on an ongoing basis throughout the Dartmouth-Hitchcock network, and condition-specific literature is available in our offices. 

SVMC Cardiac Rehab

SVMC Pulmonology

American Heart Association 

Go Red for Women 

American College of Cardiology 

140 Hospital Drive, Suite 211, Bennington, VT 05201
Phone: (802) 442-0800
Fax: (833) 343-1597

Hours:
Monday – Friday:  8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Directions: 
For directions to SVMC Cardiology, click here. 

Parking:
For appointments at SVMC Cardiology, park in parking area P3 or P5.

    related articles

    The Path of COVID-19
    Anonym
    / Categories: WELLNESS, 2021

    The Path of COVID-19

    It’s easy to see a mask and understand how it works. Facemasks help limit the spread of the COVID-19 by inserting a physical barrier between the virus and where it needs to go. This alone greatly reduces risks of contracting COVID-19. But what about the vaccine? How can we visualize how the vaccine works to limit serious illness, hospitalization, and death? Here’s a tour of an infected body, including what the immune system does and what the virus does, in vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

    Day 1: The virus enters the body through the eyes, nose, or mouth. It begins to enter healthy cells in the lining of the nose, sinus cavity, and mouth. Right away, it begins to make copies of itself. Even at this early stage, regardless of vaccination status and before symptoms arise, the infected person could be infectious to others.

    Day 2 – 5: The immune systems of vaccinated people have been provided with an early warning that the virus is coming. They can respond quickly and, potentially, illuminate the threat before it has an opportunity to cause symptoms.

    Some vaccinated people may begin having symptoms at this point and can test positive for COVID-19 at this stage. Most commonly, their symptoms remain mild and the person recovers completely within a few days.

    Day 5 – 14: Where the virus really wants to be is in the lungs. This is where it is best equipped to latch its spiky surface proteins on healthy cells. In fact, the lower airways have more ACE2 receptors than the rest of your respiratory tract, so COVID-19 is more likely to flourish there.

    Note that the vaccine doesn’t work as well in people whose immune systems are compromised. Even though they had the vaccine, the immune system may not catch the virus until it gets further into the respiratory tract, where it can do more damage.

    This is when the immune systems of people who are unvaccinated and those who are immunized but immune compromised jump into action. This group is very likely to develop a fever and a cough. Their lungs can become inflamed, which makes it difficult to breathe.

    In many cases, unvaccinated and immune-compromised people remain at home and slowly get better. Some continue to have symptoms for many months.

    Sometimes, people develop pneumonia, a lung infection, and may need hospital care. Some people go on to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In the body’s attempt to cope with the infection, the tiny air sacs that transfer oxygen to your blood start to fill with mucous. An imaging test of the lungs would show the places where parts of the lungs are no longer getting any air. The oxygen levels in the blood fall, and the person may need a ventilator to breathe. 

    The virus can also replicate in blood cells and affect the blood’s ability to work effectively. This disrupts healthy levels of critical elements like oxygen, nitrogen, iron, and others. These changes can decrease the body’s ability to transfer oxygen from the lungs into the bloodstream and from the bloodstream into other organs, which can result in harm to blood vessels, the heart, the brain, kidneys, liver, gut, eyes, and pancreas.

    Beyond Day 14: A small percentage of people will not be able to recover from their COVID infection. Others will begin to feel better but may continue to feel the after effects of COVID for many months.

    We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of COVID are for any group—vaccinated, unvaccinated, immune compromised, young, or old—but we can be certain that those who are vaccinated will fair better than those who are not.

    Marie George, MD, FIDSA, is an infectious disease specialist at SVMC Infectious Disease and Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington.

    Print
    3455
    Tags: vaccine COVID-19

    Theme picker

    Theme picker

    MORE NEWS

    Theme picker

    VIEW ALL

    Our Services

    PARTNERSHIP IS POWERFUL MEDICINE

    A commitment to excellence and a patient-centered approach sets Southwestern Vermont Health Care apart.

     Cancer Care
     Orthopedics
     Emergency
     Maternity
     Primary Care
     ExpressCare
     Cardiology
     Rehab & Residential Care
    View All Services

    Theme picker

    Theme picker

    Theme picker

    VIEW ALL