The Haywire Heart by Christopher J. Case

Author:Christopher J. Case
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VeloPress

Finding the right doctor

If you haven’t ended up in the emergency room with this problem, you will have some choice about the first doctor you go to. Even if you went in with this issue via the ER and then perhaps even wound your way through the cardio test lab and/or a hospital stay, you still will have some choice about the doctor(s) you see in the future. And if you decide to have surgical intervention, it makes sense to see a few doctors before settling on the one to work with.

As you learned in Chapter 5, many doctors do not get much exposure to the particular electrical problems of athletes. Whether there is a doctor near you with such experience can certainly be a function of where you live. If you live in an active community teeming with masters athletes, you might not be much of an exception in a cardiology practice there. When I went to see a cardiac electrophysiologist at a huge teaching hospital in Denver, the cardiac risk factors of the people in the waiting room were plain to see. There were people outside smoking, and inside were people who were overweight, in wheelchairs, and/or hooked up to oxygen. However, in the waiting room of my electrophysiologist in Boulder, I rarely see people that are obviously heart patients, and there are almost always fit-looking people waiting.

The best way to start your search for a doctor is to get recommendations for cardiologists from other athletes whom you trust who have experienced heart problems. It may be that your insurance requires you to first go to your primary care physician, who then will refer you to a specialist. In that case, if you can’t go to the cardiologist(s) others recommended to you, get a referral to one your doctor recommends.

Cardiologists are roughly split between plumbers and electricians, and if you know that your problem is not with your plumbing (a category that for our purposes would include congenital heart problems, valve problems, and so on), then that narrows it down to electrophysiologists. Some doctors you will relate to, and some you won’t, so seek out one whom you feel comfortable talking to and who answers your questions clearly. Be willing to switch to a different doctor if you don’t click with the first one. And, if you are going to have an ablation performed, you should be aware that some electrophysiologists are particularly skilled in ablating some types of arrhythmias and are perhaps not so effective with other types. So get as many recommendations as you can from people whom you trust who are also knowledgeable about your particular diagnosis.

As Dr. Mandrola mentioned in Chapter 5, the doctor doesn’t need to know your whole athletic history, what races you have coming up, and where you think you’ll place in them. However, I have found that cardiologists often appreciate seeing printouts of heart rate graphs downloaded from a heart rate monitor that show where the heart spiked up or down.

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