Why this website?
Cardiac Assessment was created to enable you to take charge and make informed decisions about your own heart care. These are the facts:
Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) caused 425,425 deaths in 2006 and is the single leading cause of death in America today.
Despite ample supply of information about CAD on the Internet, it is frequently difficult to find and understand, especially if you want to learn what your best options are for treatment. You, and often your doctors as well, are facing a bewildering set of changing guidelines for treatment and what constitutes “best advice”.
To make understanding your options even more difficult, advertising and for-profit research have as primary goal to sell product, no different in this field as it is in other industries. As a result, therapy is often biased towards what is most profitable, and not necessarily what is best for you, the patient.
This website will provide you with general information about your heart and CAD. In addition, after answering a few questions, you will get free, personalized information about what the optimal treatment is for patients like you. Usually this is only available via consultation with a cardiac specialist, and thus quite expensive. Although this information will often be identical to what you will hear from your own doctor, I hope you will find it helpful, even if it only confirms what you already know.
The website also has an interactive component that will be used to highlight specific issues and questions. It will also act as an industry watchdog, translating medical news into a language understandable by lay people. I have spent my career taking care of patients with heart disease and am an expert in all issues that patients like you face, and will use this knowledge help you get answers to questions, such as:
- Can medications, diet & exercise alone take care of my illness?
- What are my chances?
- If I need a procedure, will that be it, or do I need more than one?
- How much will it cost?
- Should I go elsewhere for treatment?
Too often, patients are afraid to ask these and other questions and it is only afterwards, particularly if things haven’t gone as promised, that these issues come up. This is why this website was created and I hope you will be able to make good use of it.
The questionnaire part is private and your personal information protected. In order to cover some of the expenses (website maintenance is expensive!), I will accept donations as well as allow advertising.
There is a section intended for health care providers, where important new medical information about heart disease is available, including a number of risk assessment algorithms. Feel free to look around, but understand that the professional literature featured here can be difficult to understand. The selection will be based on what is important to know for non cardiac health care providers. Some of this will then be discussed via the interactive portion of the website.
I will guarantee you however, that all content will be free and independent of any commercial influence,