Week 7: Immersion in Review: A Systematic Approach to Cardiology

Patient problem, diagnosis, treatment. Although I’ve known this general process of medicine, through my immersion experience I sought to gain an in-depth understanding of what this means in cardiology. How are conditions and diseases presented and recognized? Over what range of severities and urgencies do they present? What is the process by which certain conditions are diagnosed, and how are diagnostic tests chosen? This summer has enabled me to obtain a systematic view of cardiology, observing the whole range from clinics to OR’s and seeing all of the diagnostic testing in between.

Seeing the systematic process of medicine not only gave me exposure to (much of) the gamut of cardiovascular diseases, diagnostics, treatments, and technologies, but also gave me great insight into the logical process of medicine. I feel like I now have a grasp on how a clinician might take patient symptoms and stories to an appropriate diagnostic test (such as to one of the many types of stress testing or imaging) in order to best expound patient pathophysiology and decide an appropriate course of treatment, but I have also seen many instances in which clinicians may not have used a systematic and logical approach which can lead to unnecessary testing and sometimes scaring patients.

Above all, I feel that this summer has (1) given me a strong foundation in cardiology for my future PhD research on dilated cardiomyopathy and (2) given me new insight on how biomedical engineering and medicine go hand in hand. Both of these will guide my future career and have given a new context for my research and field, which has only come about due to the nature of this immersion program.