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It's a call that's telling me I'm here to serve. It's a need to make a difference in
the world. 24 hours day or night these healing hands will make it right. Looking in their
eyes I know that I'm changing lives, changing lives, changing lives for the better, for
the better, changing lives. Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Annie Varughese and I'm here to welcome
you to the Best Docs Network television show. I'm trained at the Texas Heart Institute and
we want to bring fabulous medicine to our community and to the world. We are featuring
some of the best physicians in the Houston are that helped to change people's lives.
We have a fabulous show for you today. Let's learn more about our first doctor, bariatric
surgeon Dr. Robert Marvin. We have young, young people who are already having thickening
of their heart muscle. They're already not quite having normal function and it's the
earliest signs that there's a problem there, that the heart's working against a large,
extra load that it normally wouldn't have to. When I originally started to even look
into this after I had talked to my friend, I was probably between 335 and 340. I had
been that for 10 or 15 years, been over 300 pounds for at least 15 or 20 years. We're
giving them back some of that control in that one area where they've had a problem. But
it's a dangerous area. You can't walk around at 310 pounds and think everything's going
to be okay for very long, it's not. There's been times when I'd lost weight before. I've
gotten down to 225 before but 6 months later I'm back at 300 and that was always my issue.
And after you do that 2 or 3 times you know why do you want to do it again because you
know what's going to happen. I actually had a buddy of mine that did the surgery probably
a year before I started looking into it and he had had great results. His weight loss
was incredible from what I'd seen and I'd known the guy for several years, so and he
was completely, completely happy and excited with everything, so that's when I started
looking into the surgery myself. Buck has lost 115 pounds in about 6 months after having
a sleeve gastric. I mean that's a good, good outcome so far. We're only partway through,
we're gonna expect more weight loss beyond that. Although he's clearly getting down towards
his ideal body weight which is what we'd ideally like to happen. I started off at 335 or 340
January of 2011 and it's what February of 2012 and I'm at 186. It's like being reborn.
Before I guess I just kind of just muddled through life, no excitement, just do what
I had to do to get by, no energy, no fun. Now, I mean excitement, fun, romance, social
life, things that I didn't have before. He changed my life. It's a whole new world every
day. We are one million strong. We are united behind a cure. There are over one million
colorectal cancer survivors in the United States. My name is Charles Kelley from Lady
Antebellum and I'm in this fight against colorectal cancer because it actually hits pretty close
to my family. My father-in-law was diagnosed with it and the thing about this disease is
it is preventable. And so I encourage everybody to go get screened, let's beat this thing.
Colleen had a robotic hysterectomy. She had abnormal bleeding after menopause and that
is always a very worrisome sign if a woman experiences. My *** was very thick and
above all my symptoms and because of my age you know I'm 62 years old so it was time.
Now Colleen was potentially a case of uterine cancer so I decided to do a robotic hysterectomy
on her so that if we needed to we could continue after the hysterectomy looking for cancer
in other places. I was very impressed with Dr. Imtiaz when I came into her office and
her staff. They lined all of my appointments up for me. I just couldn't have been happier
with her. I knew as soon as I met her that I was going to be in good hands. She explained
everything great. Robotic hysterectomy I usually do for patients who may have other conditions
that preclude them from having a routine laparoscopic hysterectomy. Some of these conditions could
be a very large uterus or if we suspect cancer or if the patient has had multiple abdominal
surgeries and we are suspecting adhesions or scar tissue inside the abdomen or in patients
who are overweight. When I get up in the morning I think to myself I just have so much to look
forward to because I don't have that pain, that misery and I have a lot of ambition right
now. I mean, I'm able to do a lot more things. I'm not constantly thinking about oh my God
I don't feel good today. You know as a gynecologist, as a surgeon, it makes my day when I see a
patient get up and walk out shortly after her surgery. I think it's silly to have somebody
bedbound for six weeks, not be able to walk around, not be able to take care of her household
when the answer is simple. I know that I can get them up and about moving and back to their
life immediately. In today's Ask the Doctor, Sarah from Kingwood has a question for Dr.
Annie. What is high blood pressure? High blood pressure is a measurement of 140 over 90 or
greater. That means the systolic blood pressure is 140, the diastolic blood pressure or the
bottom number of 90. Anything above that is high blood pressure. Recently data has shown
that even blood pressure in the 130 over 80 range can be borderline high blood pressure
and should be evaluated and treated. High blood pressure can cause many diseases including
coronary artery disease, can affect the blood flow to the kidneys and cause kidney failure,
can cause stroke and multiple other problems, so it's an easy thing to treat if it's found.
Again the problem is high blood pressure is not found because it's a silent killer. Check
your blood pressure with you doctor, make sure you have regular checkups and that can
be a great prevention therapy for you with regard to high blood pressure. The symptoms
is I had headaches, a lot of congestion and infections in the throat, a lot of mucous
in the back, ear aches, so much stuff going on. Jenice Martinez is a patient who came
to my office complaining of nasal obstruction, facial pressure, constant headache. She has
been treated under multiple medications including antibiotics, antihistamine, nasal spray without
really, without any good success. I went on but then I started getting infections and
I was on antibiotics for four months in a row that they kept giving me. So I was like
this is not good. So when we examined Ms. Jenice Martinez we found that her natural
sinus drainage pathway is obstructed by chronic inflammation, chronic infection so we offered
her the option of doing balloon sinuplasty. The best part was the breathing. I could breathe
again. The headaches little by little started going away. Now when I sleep I would breathe
real loud. My husband would always say that and I don't do that no more. So when you have
a chronic sinus disease that passage is obstructed, it's narrowed by chronic inflammation, chronic
infection. So what we do is we put a small balloon in the passage and we open up, inflate
the balloon and open up the natural passage preserving the normal anatomy. And I don't
sound like I have colds all the time. Before I was like I was sick all the time. And now
I'm doing great. I can go out, do everything and I feel good. One of the advantages is
the quick recovery. There's really no down time to balloon sinuplasty. The procedure
can be done in the office under local anesthesia or topical anesthesia with some nasal spray.
There's not really a recovery time for balloon patient. Can you know go back to the daily
activity the next day, and compared to traditional surgery which recovery can last to a week.
Taking care of the cardiac patient has always been my passion. I trained at the Texas Heart
Institute where we know that we have to be aggressive in saving people's lives. I also
love preventive cardiology. I want to tell you the story about Thomas, a man who didn't
even know that he had coronary disease and came to my office, proceeded to die on the
table, but we were able to save him. Listen to the story and take it to heart. Maybe this
will help you or someone that you love and save their life. Coronary disease is a type
of vascular disease where plaque coats the inside of the vessel to the point where there's
a growth and that's called stenosis. The number one problem with regard to formation of plaque
is cholesterol. So we have different types of cholesterol, LDL cholesterol. We have HDL
which is the good cholesterol, LDL being the bad. Triglycerides are another bad cholesterol.
So it's very important to do advanced testing of the lipids. Back in 2000 I was working,
had some pains in my chest, went to my general practitioner, he examined me and said you
need to go see the cardiologist today. Made an appointment for me with Dr. Varughese and
when she examined me she said, stay right there, you're going to the hospital. The case
of Thomas is quite interesting. He came at the beginning of my practice years, I've been
practicing for 18 years now and Thomas came as a new patient and just complained of intermittent
chest pain. We proceeded to take care of him and he proceeded to die on the table and had
no heartbeat so we of course started resuscitative measures immediately and quickly transported
him to the cardiac catheterization laboratory. Found a severe blockage in the right coronary
artery and that's why he had become hypotensive, his blood pressure had dropped, his heart
rate had slowed down to nothing and he had stopped. So in the office I pounded his chest
and started CPR and then we took him to the cath lab. I was very lucky. I mean if you're
going to have it, If you're going to have that kind of thing happen, being in a cardiologists
office is one of the better places to be. The thing that's most amazing I think about
Dr. Varughese is her concern for her patients and her constant drive, her constant searching
for things to help them, not only when they've had the heart attack but helping prevention
of the heart attack. Her personality of her patient care is phenomenal. How do you know
if you have carpal tunnel syndrome? The carpal tunnel is a little tunnel that a nerve goes
through in your wrist. And people who have carpal tunnel syndrome will generally awake
in the middle of the night with their hands being numb, their fingers will tingle. Sometimes
that tingling will go up their arms. Now generally it goes away when they wake up and they shake
their arms, mainly because they're changing the position. When we're asleep our hands
tend to go like this and that cuts off that carpal tunnel which is the little nerve that's
in there, it's called the median nerve. That gives you the tingling in your fingers and
sometimes up the median nerve into your arm. So one way to prevent it is to sleep with
splints or ace bandages that keep your wrists at a neutral or up position instead of letting
them collapse like this. Also we see a lot of carpal tunnel syndrome in people who have
gained a lot of weight because that puts pressure on the inside of that tunnel. Also there's
something about diabetes that affects that nerve. But in general if you wake up with
your fingers tingling at night, it's not your circulation, it's probably your carpal tunnel.
Lots of easy ways to fix that, so don't panic, just get it checked. For additional Medical
Minutes from Dr. Honaker, logon to bestdocsnetwork.com, click on Education and the Medical Minute
tab. For numerous years I've had varicose veins. I'm a registered nurse and so I have
been on my feet for twenty years and also heredity has played into that and so just
a lot of varicosities and some pain, aching if I've been standing on my feet for a long
period of time and then just unsightliness. Varicose veins are a symptom. They're a sign
of an underlying disease or abnormality in the venous circulation. In your legs there
is no heart to pump the used blood back up so the pumps are your muscles and when the
veins become too large and one way check valves have failed now all the pumping doesn't work
and the blood pools in the legs, it creates high pressure which results in bulging, enlarged
veins that we call varicose veins. My dermatologist recommended Dr. Morgan and he was very forthcoming
with information. It wasn't a lot of extraneous things that I didn't understand, it was very
to the point you know exactly what he could do for me and what the benefits, what the
side effects and it gave me an opportunity to just weigh the pros and cons of whether
I wanted to go forward. The treatment is to close all the veins that are running backwards.
Any vein that is not pumping up out of the leg is only hurting, it doesn't help and so
by removing or closing those veins you restore the circulation out of the legs back to normal.
The procedure itself probably took 30 to 45 minutes. I was able to get up off the procedure
table right afterwards and walk. I did have improvement and cosmetically which is a wonderful
side benefit but I also have decreased swelling, decreased aching, really it's very minimal.
She got a great result. Her swelling has gone away completely, her pain has gone away completely
and her varicose veins have gone away completely as well. Wow that was a fabulous story with
great information. If you want to have more information on any of the doctors you have
seen on today's show, go to our website, bestdocsnetwork.com. Now it's time to head to our next doctor,
Dr. Paul Metz, who's an oral surgeon in the Houston area. The ideal patients for dental
implants are ones that have been through lots of restorative procedures and where these
procedures just aren't predictable and so we're able to give them their third set of
teeth with the use of dental implants. I had an accident when I was 10 years old and I
fell down on my face and I dislocated my jaw. And I didn't know that then, but started looking
for the oldest doctor or the one with 35 years or more of experience so I went to the facility
on Gessner and I saw Dr. Metz and they said this is the guy who's going to have to be
working on you. I had to decide if I wanted to go through with it and I did research.
He graduated top in the class. So in Teco we were able to move his upper jaw forward
and set his lower jaw back so as to help line up his skeleton so that his teeth meshed together
well. We as specialists in oral surgery are uniquely qualified to provide these procedures.
I just figured out this is the best facility, this is the best doctor and I truly believe
that you know. Dr. Metz and his team they know what they're doing. With these patients,
we know when they come down the hallway, when we see them after this procedure, we see their
level of confidence has gone up tremendously. We can tell by the smile on their face as
well as their dress. They're dressed sharply and they're holding their chin up. You can
certainly tell that they are happier individuals afterwards. Technology today you know has
really revolutionized how we practice implant dentistry. We have comb beam CT's which allow
us to take a CT of the patient in the office and in about 20 seconds we have 360 degrees
of bone around the implant. So we know ahead of time whether we need to graft and also
the type of grafting that we need to do ahead of time. So patients are better prepared for
the experience and know more of what to expect afterwards. We are able to do this in a safer
fashion. It's much more rapid. The procedures are much more rapid and the recovery is much
easier as well. For addition health information, be sure to check out our Healthy Living blog
for the best tips, latest medical procedures and up to date news for modern medicine at
our website at bestdocsnetwork.com.
High cholesterol is a major problem in this country as well as in many countries around
the world. High cholesterol leads to atherosclerosis, blockage of arteries that affect many organs
throughout our bodies. So how can we effectively treat high cholesterol? There are medications,
but sometimes medications can cause multiple problems for patients, multiple side effects,
muscle pain, weakness, breakdown of muscles, liver disfunction to name just a few. So,
we know that natural has always been the best and we look for natural therapy with regard
to cholesterol reduction. There is something that we use called Bios Life Slim which is
a fiber product created at Stanford University about twenty years ago to treat high cholesterol
in those patients who are intolerant to medications. It's been there for twenty years but not many
people know about it. We use it in our practice and we've taught many doctors how to use this
effectively to lower cholesterol. LDL is lowered by 30 percent, triglycerides lowered by about
50, so ask your doctor about Bios Life Slim. Look for it, it's an amazing therapy. It will
help you to change your life. Minnie presented in my office complaining of a painful bunion
deformity. A bunion deformity is a deviation of the great toe where you see that bump on
the side or bump on the top. It has to do with a deviation of the first metatarsal and
basically you know just became really painful for her to walk in her regular shoes. Yes,
because I really had this bunion I think like probably about a year. And so it had got so
bad I couldn't even wear a shoe so that's what really made me came in you know to have
surgery on it. The next step was for us to take an x-ray to evaluate her foot and determine
what kind of you know surgery would be appropriate. So after looking at her metatarsal angle we
basically decided that a Austin Bunionectomy would be the best procedure and so that's
what we ended up doing. After I had the surgery I felt much better. You know, no pain. It
just felt better and I was so happy you know to get it done. I mean as long as you address
the underlying ideology, the cause of it, then you're not going to get a recurrence
and it's wonderful, I mean, you know people suffer from painful bunions all the time.
It can be painful to the point that you can actually develop an ulcer at the side bump
because first it gets red, the next thing you know you have a wound and that can be
problematic because then you can get an infection to the bone. I mean it's not sore or nothing.
It just feels better and so he really do a good job and he makes me feel comfortable.
I mean he's a real good doctor. Bunion surgery has a bad knock to it you know. A lot of people
are concerned that they've heard from their neighbor or they know someone at work who's
had the surgery and it's extremely painful. I have some patients that have zero pain from
bunion surgery but I can keep the area numb for three days with a pain pump, which is
a device that just gives a continuous drip of local anesthetic and keeps it nice and
numb. Because really inflammation is the first part of wound healing and that's in the first
seventy two hours, so the first three days. It's a great relief for patients, really two
weeks of just not putting weight on it and you know it's really come a long way with
our surgeries. Dr. Meredith Morgan is one of the best physicians in helping women manage
menopause. Practicing for over 35 years, Dr. Morgan as you see has a unique office. It's
located in the museum district, a free-standing facility with a relaxed atmosphere. Today's
topic, perimenopause. It's really important to understand that this is a normal process
and it happens with all women. It starts in their mid-forties. The average age of onset
is 47 and on average it lasts about four years. According to Dr. Morgan, perimenopause represents
a change. Women will experience a number of symptoms. This is a time of relative estrogen
deficiency and brings on mind, mood, memory and even sleep disorders and irregularities.
Yes, there are hot flashes and night sweats that most women think of as menopausal and
yes they can be just as severe as the post menopausal ones. But the differentiation between
transitioning and a non-cycling constant state is the unpredictability and uncertainty that
can be so distressing to a woman. For women experiencing perimenopause, Dr. Morgan outlines
the next step. We have three levels of management. The first will be basically lifestyle adjustments
and home remedies. The second is non-hormonal medical prescriptions and the third is hormonal
management. We want to treat at the lowest dose for the shortest duration consistent
with what the need is. We have to understand it's important to use what is acceptable to
the woman herself. In my mind, without a doubt, we've taken a step forward for the city of
Houston and its surrounding environment. We've developed a site that is comfortable and convenient
that provides medical center quality with minimizing the hassle that's involved. It's
been very rewarding to have done this for the last ten years and I'm looking forward
to the next ten and twenty years in continuing to help women throughout the entire region.
To be a comprehensive breast center doesn't mean having a nice building and a nice name
on the center. There's a lot of people that have done that. What makes you a comprehensive
breast center is working with other physician's specialties together to do the best that you
can possibly do for each patient. It's important that when we find an abnormality that the
radiologist understands the pathology, knows what to biopsy, when to biopsy and then can
communicate that back to the referring physician, communicate it to the patient and communicate
to the pathologist what our concerns are. This is what the beauty is of a comprehensive
breast center. So, it really means working together as a team. Working with your breast
surgeons, working with the pathologist, working with the radiation oncologist, the plastic
surgeons and we work as a team. When people come to TOPS company, that's a breast center
or if they come to one of our Memorial Hermann breast centers what they'll see is a group
of dedicated breast radiologists. So when they come to one of our centers, you're dealing
with a radiologist who is focused on finding cancer at the earliest stage. And one of the
things that we talk about as a group we want to disrupt as few lives as possible while
finding cancers at their earliest stage. That's our mission statement. Someone comes in and
we have a finding on the mammogram or they come in with a palpable lump and they need
an ultrasound. In many facilities this is performed by a technologist, the doctor may
or may not ever see the patient. If they do see the patient they only look at the area
of interest. It is our policy in our practice that the radiologist comes in on every patient.
We scan every patient ourselves. Yes, our technologist looks, but we scan every patient.
My strong belief is and I think statistics prove that is that when you have specialists
doing this you get a better result. In our practice that's what we do. That's the whole
focus of our practice. You know it's a very special group of people from all over the
country from very well trained facilities and so it's an exciting group to be part of.
Well that'll do it, that'll wrap up another edition of the Best Docs Network featuring
some of the best physicians in the Houston area that have helped change people's lives.
For more information for any of the fine doctors that you have seen on today's show, head to
our website at bestdocsnetwork.com. If you have a question or a comment for us we'd love
to hear from you, send us an email at info@bestdocsnetwork.com. See you next time.