Your Heart: An Owner's Guide

"Your Heart: An Owner's Guide" provides invaluable information for any patient walking out of a doctor's office with heart issues. It is written in a concise and understandable question and answer format by two top heart specialists, a cardiologist and a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Yale School of Medicine. And, it is not necessary to read the entire book - only those areas that apply to you. For example, the book explains how patients should prepare for elective heart surgery, those without anginal pain. "Most important is that you keep active. We do not want you to arrive deconditioned and debilitated. The body deteriorates very quickly with inactivity. If you remain sedentary in the days or weeks leading up to your surgery, you will find yourself with weaker bones, muscles, and lungs. This weakness will be exacerbated by the changes around the time of your operation. Your recovery will be prolonged and your health will be in jeopardy. So, keep active. In most cases, keep going to work, shopping, driving, walking, even exercising." More-or-less a "professional" patient, and a grateful one, I have been a heart patient of cardiologist Lawrence Cohen, MD for over 35 years. I was born in 1947 with congenital heart defects, had corrective surgery in 1964, back surgeries in the 1990s, a gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) removed in 2005 and heart surgery again in 2006. Whether you or a family member has a heart murmur, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, diabetes, or is in need of surgery, "Your Heart: An Owner's Guide" is not only educational, but empowering and takes away some of the fear associated with heart disease. Your cardiologist might determine that you have to make a lifestyle change in order to improve your cardiovascular health. For some patients, a non-invasive therapy might be helpful. In other cases, the book is an ideal text for support groups such as "Heart of Hearts" (Open-Heart Patients' Education & Support Series) at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian and similar hospital programs throughout the country.

A professor of surgery and a professor of medicine team up to provide lay readers with a user-friendly guide to heart health, offering the latest on hypertension, high cholesterol, various heart conditions and diseases, and more. Finally here is a guide which takes into account all kinds of influences on heart disease, its progression, and its treatment - and translates the latest research into terms easy for non-medical readers to understand, making this the perfect pick for public lending collections.