HFYH: Modernizing Cardiovascular Health | Dr. Jeremy London #HotForYourHealth

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:03)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health, and culture as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, your orthopedic surgeon and longevity doc, and I'm thrilled again that you've joined me for another session of HOT For Your Health. Today, I have a kindred spirit. We've been talking behind the set, and I know that we would get along in the surgeon's lounge as we're waiting for our next cases. Dr. Jeremy London is a board-certified cardiovascular surgeon with more than 31 years of experience, not only educating the public, as you see him now on his wildly successful social channels, but 31 years at the bedside, preventing disease, curing disease, getting you through some of the most harrowing times in your life. As you know, Dr. London, my family dies of cardiovascular disease, so I have been there with my grandparents, and my parents are still living, thankfully. But you practice in Savannah, Georgia, and one of your training grounds is a hospital that's near and dear to me, which is, I call it Hospital of the Carolinas. I'm not sure that's its official name, but welcome to my little podcast, HOT For Your Health.

**Dr. Jeremy London** (1:42)
Well, thank you so much. I am honored to be a part. I really am.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:47)
You know, I've been, as we tend to do on social media, I've been watching what you're doing. I'm loving what you're producing and all the forms you're taking. But I wanted to step back because most of the general public doesn't know what an orthopedic surgeon, sports surgeon actually does. And I guarantee you, all they know about cardiothoracic surgery is you got to be really smart and you crack some chest. But that is not actually the nuance, the amazing part of what you do. Just tell people what it means to be a cardiovascular surgeon.

**Dr. Jeremy London** (2:20)
Sure. So the interesting thing is that that has really evolved over the last probably 15 to 20 years. And so when you say cardiothoracic surgery or cardiovascular surgery, that all kind of gets lumped into the board certification for thoracic surgery, which years ago, that included both thoracic oncology, as well as cardiovascular surgery that included the heart and all blood vessels basically from the base of the skull, because everything above is the neurosurgeons or the brain doctors, really all the way down to the tip of the toes. And so the scope of the practice when I was in training included all of those things. And consequently, even once I got out in practice, that was still the case. I practiced all three things. I was a thoracic surgical oncologist and general vascular surgery, which I'm boarded in as well, and I have an interest there, as well as cardiac surgery specifically for the heart. And not to get too far in the weeds, but the long and short of it is, each of those disciplines have gotten so big that really you cannot stay current and up to date and cutting edge and really good at trying to do all of those things. So interestingly, even the training programs now require that you make a choice after your first year, that you're going to be a thoracic surgeon and doing surgical oncology primarily, or you're going to be a cardiac surgeon.
And I kind of went through that same evolution kind of on my own in practice after about 10 years, where I decided I can't be good at all of these things and be as good as I want to be at all of these things. So I chose cardiac surgery, but I'm a much better cardiac surgeon than I am general thoracic surgery, because that was the nature of my training. And at the time, our technology wasn't as good for general thoracic surgery. So for lung cancer, for instance, for stage one, small lesion disease, it was almost an exercise in futility to operate on these people because we really, we really weren't up to date with how to treat these folks with radiation that was really focused in chemotherapy and all these things. And I don't like an exercise in futility when I walk into the operating room, because I'm sure you don't either. We never want the risk benefits to be flat. We always want the benefits to be here and the risk to be lower. So it really became an easy decision for me to shift towards cardiac surgery, which basically involves diseases of the heart. And that comes in really kind of two basic buckets. One is blockages in the heart arteries that causes heart attacks and chest pain and things of that nature, as well as problems with the valves of the heart, both leaking valves as well as blocked valves. And that's, you know, it's interesting because cardiac surgery really didn't see a lot of significant change for a long period of time, probably 50 to 60 years. I mean, how I was trained is very similar to the training from years ago. And I'm sure that you kind of had that same experience in orthopedics. And then suddenly there's some sort of breakthrough. And for the most part, that has involved much more minimally invasive approaches as it has in other specialties in kind of two forms. One is catheter-based therapy. In other words, going in through the blood vessels, typically in the groin, with very small devices. And we can replace and repair valves doing that, even with the patient awake, which is amazing.