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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 Grace Sells and welcome back for another edition of Best Docs
Network, the show featuring some of the best doctors in the
Houston area that are changing lives. Up first we're going to
introduce you to plastic surgeon Dr. David Altamira. I had kind
of a bump up here on the bridge and the end kind of hung down a
little bit. It just was a little bit big. And I think a couple
times in my life guys had made comments like, oh our kids would
have really big noses. Well Holly came in with just the
thought that it bothered her for a long time that her nose just
didn't match her face. She's an otherwise very attractive young
lady but she'd always had just a large nose that was out of
proportion to the rest of her face. I mean overall Dr.
Altamira made the experience so easy and simple and I think out
of all the doctors that I spoke with, he was the one who made me
the most at ease with the process and he said you know you
can always do more but let's do something modest for now,
overall really comfortable. First we talk to the patient at
length. We ask them what they like about their nose and then
what they don't like about their nose. There are certain things
that you know we can change and certain things we don't want to
change if they're happy with that. We'll take several
photographs from different angles and then we can project
them on the computer screen for the patient. And we can actually
morph the images to show the patient what they can possibly
look like. And that way we can make sure we're on the same page
as far as what the patient wants to look like and what can
actually be accomplished in surgery so that they do have
realistic expectations and we can kind of give them a good
idea of what they actually will look like after surgery. The
recovery time was really quick. Dr. Altamira had explained that
it would hurt for a little bit, even gave me painkillers but I
think I took two of them. It wasn't as painful nearly as I
thought it would be. And I think I had some soreness if I would
touch it for maybe a month after but overall it didn't hurt.
Rhinoplasty is basically changing the shape of the nose.
It can be done for a variety of reasons. Usually it's a lot of
times just the patient has always felt their nose was too
big for their face, they were never happy with their
appearance so it's basically a great operation that can be used
to reshape a person's nose to match their face better. It was
so exciting taking that bandaid off for the first time. When you
look at yourself in the mirror you always notice an
imperfection that maybe you don't like and for the first
time I looked and thought, oh my nose is adorable. For dry skin
incorporate more avocados into your diet. They're rich in mono
unsaturated fat and vitamin E, both of which promote healthy
skin. Try them on salads and sandwiches and even in
smoothies. I came to Dr. Lewis because I always wanted to have
really white teeth and my teeth were straight. I never had to
wear braces, didn't have any of those issues but I had extreme
sensitivity. So I could not use any of the whitening strips or
just the gels that anyone could. I had a, my gums were receding
probably because I'm one of those brushers that brush the
wrong way, didn't do the circular motion. She really
wanted veneers. She had just gone through a lot of personal
stuff and she wanted to make a change in her life, but she
really did not want her teeth touched. She did not want
anything reduced on her teeth or anything prepared. So he sort of
walked me through the process and I found out that what he
could do was I didn't have to have any you know, didn't have
to have my teeth all filed down. They just sort of buffed them
and he just recreated sort of my smile. It didn't, it's really
strange because he didn't change a whole lot but it did change a
whole lot. So we did the set on her and it turned out beautiful.
I've done thousands of them and people were very happy with them
and they're, and what we found out is in most cases they're
stronger, even though they're very thin, they're stronger than
regular veneers because the strength isn't derived totally
from the thickness of porcelain, I mean you have to have a
certain thickness, but it's derived from the bond to the
tooth and we found that when we bond to the enamel which is the
natural outer layer of the tooth that we get a much stronger,
much harder veneer. Just the craftsmanship was amazing. I
mean it was like going to a da Vinci or somebody because it was
such tiny details but it really changed my smile. So in
actuality not only are they you know less destructive to the
tooth or you don't have to take anything off the tooth, but
they're also stronger and so they look, they look great. It
was painless, came back, put them on, was getting my hands
massaged during the whole process and I walked out and I
had a perfect smile that looked natural. I enjoy smiling and I
love having people say you have the prettiest smile. If you eat
healthy you're going to be healthy so what are the major
rules for eating healthy? First of all eat breakfast. It takes
your body off that emergency that you've been on overnight.
Emergency isn't good for your body. It causes lots of problems
with blood pressure and cholesterol. Secondly eat
anything that is red, orange or green. Those types of foods that
are red, orange or green tend to have what's called
phytochemicals. They tend to be anitoxidants and they prevent
heart attacks, strokes and many cancers. Eating a Mediterranean
diet is a great idea. The Greek people have a wonderful idea
about what to eat. They eat a lot of beans, a lot of fiber,
not much in the way of red meat that's high in fat. Fish is an
important part of your diet. We need to eat less red meat in
America and more fish. And also more non red meat like the white
meats like veal, chicken, turkey. Red meat has more
cholesterol. Also barbequed food is not a good idea. The barbeque
flavor occurs because the smoke deposits chemicals on to the
surface of the meat that tastes good but they also tend to be
cancer causing chemicals so limit your barbeque to once a
week. For additional Medical Minutes from Dr. Honaker, logon
to bestdocsnetwork.com, click on Education and the Medical Minute
tab. All of the great doctors that you've seen on our show
today have profiles on our website complete with bios,
photos, videos and you even have the ability to request an
appointment. That includes our next doctor, interventional
cardiologist Dr. Annie Varughese. As you get older
sometimes you have trouble finding words, so my daughter
got all worried and she made me go to a neurologist. So he does
his thing, go back later and he said, it looks like you had a
couple of small strokes. They're small, they're not going to
bother you but he says, you need to go to a cardiologist to check
out your heart just to be on the safe side. Valvular heart
disease encompasses many different entities. The heart
has four different valves and Gary had actually infection and
rupture of his mitral valve which is a very important valve
separating the top and bottom chamber of the left side of the
heart. So she sent me to Houston Northwest Hospital where she
ordered ultrasound for me. You know I feel fine, can I go home
now? So my wife and I are sitting there and she comes in
with this film of the ultrasound and she says, can you see the
mitral valve there? I said no I'm not trained for that. So she
points to it with her pen and she said it's right there
hanging down in the ventricle. It's been ruined with bacteria
and it's not doing anything. And so she says within a month
you're going to have a massive heart failure and I heard my
wife gasp you know and I got rocked and said wait a minute, I
feel fine. She said, I'll check you into the hospital right now.
Gary had mitral valve prolapse, therefore the valve was not
closing properly, was redundant and thick and therefore it was
easy for bacteria to stick to that valve and cause infection.
And this happened before I met him and his story is quite
interesting, how he came to me. He immediately needed surgery
because his valve was infected and ruptured and not working at
all. But he's very thankful that he came because we were able to
save him. Obviously I lived but the point is I may not have if
Dr. Vaughese had not caught that ruined mitral valve and so I owe
her. Welcome. Today we're joined by Dr. Denton Cooley, a native
Houstonian and the actual founder of the Texas Heart
Institute. What a pleasure to be with you today Dr. Cooley. Thank
you for joining us. You're welcome and thank you for
visiting our institution. Can you tell us a little background
about how the Texas Heart Institute became an entity? Well
it I think began in the mid 1950's when open heart surgery
was first introduced in our Texas Medical Center and before
long my program here at St. Luke's and Children's Hospital
was probably the most prolific of all institutions in the
country including the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic and
everything. We had a simplified technique of open heart surgery
and soon began a leadership position in this new field of
cardiac surgery. Well then I decided to create this institute
in 1962 so it's been a little over 50 years ago. What is your
most vivid memory about the Texas Heart Institute, about any
type of incredible learning that has been occurring here, what's
your greatest memory? Well of course our heart institute was
created with two objectives, that is, research and education.
So in each of those aspects of our history I think there are
certain exciting things that have happened. And when the
Texas Heart Institute first came into being cardio thoracic
surgery was high on the list of available procedures to be done
for patients. Now we have the artificial heart and the LVAD's
and so would you tell the audience about that? Well I
think that it shows the evolution of cardiac surgery.
First we started off replacing just some of the components of
the human heart, that is the valves and the great vessels and
modifying the ventricles and that sort of thing. And then the
big breakthrough came in 1968 when we did the first successful
heart transplant to replace the entire organ and that was really
an exciting period that followed that because it was such a new
concept. Amazing, right? And we have actual volunteers here at
the hospital who have been survivors from cardiac
transplants for about 20 years now. Oh yes, our initial work in
transplantation, we did I think about 15 or 20 heart transplants
in that early era. But so many of these patients suffered from
rejection of the tissues, but in the early 1980's a new
breakthrough came with the development of a drug called
cyclosporine which is still in use today and has made it
possible for some patients to survive transplantation for 20
or 30 years so it's a really big change. Quite miraculous and you
are such a part of that endeavor and we humbly thank you for
everything you've done for the world population actually. Well,
there's a great satisfaction to me to see how this institution
and our whole medical center has grown during my lifetime. Thank
you and now we're taking you again all over the world with
Best Docs Network and we just wonder if you have something in
these closing remarks that you can tell our public something
about the Texas Heart Institute that you would like them to take
to heart. Well I think that we have done a great deal to reach
our objective, original objective of research and
education and at the same time we have made many advances in
just clinical medicines and surgery and have enjoyed a
leadership position in this new development now that has sort of
inspired the entire medical community around the world and
you can find large cardiac programs going in Europe, in
South America and elsewhere in North America. It's just amazing
to see how rapidly it's expanded. Well for all of us who
have trained under your great leadership, we humbly thank you
and we give you great honor Dr. Cooley. Thank you for being with
us today. Well, thank you. 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. For more information and to check out
hundreds of great videos, head to our website,
bestdocsnetwork.com. Up next we're going to introduce you to
gynecologist Dr. Meredith Morgan. Osteoporosis is a
disease, it's a disease of bones. It manifests as either a
fracture or the realization that the bones are very, very thin
with a high risk of fracture. It's important, it's common. It
happens in over 50 percent of women post menopausal. That is
to say over half of women over the age of 50 are going to have
a fracture in their lifetime and it's serious because some people
that have hip fractures will die very quickly and some people
will go into a nursing home and not get out. Since it's a
function of time and duration of estrogen deficiency, the time
since estrogen deficiency with a thinning of the bone is
predictable. It may be needed sooner if there are other risk
factors for thinning of the bone sooner, smoking, extreme
thinness, sedentary lifestyle, parent's history or a previous
low trauma fracture. Most objective way to quantitate the
status of the bone health, thickness or thinness is to
measure the areas of interest to the spine and the hip since
those carry the most risk of morbidity and mortality. It's
done on an x-ray type device called a bone density unit. It's
painless, it's easy, it's safe. It involves lying on a table and
being positioned as you're able. It's not exactly the same as
doing x-rays for fractures. Although it may be more
sensitive for certain kinds of painless fractures, it's not for
diagnosis of various diseases or fractures in general. The
ultimate goal of screening is to prevent death and disability
from fractures. We're trying to predict fractures based on age
and the thickness of the bone. If someone has very thin bone
then they have a very high risk for fracture. We recommend that
all women have bone density testing at age 65 and sooner if
they have risk factors that would indicate that they would
have high or increased risk for fracture. Eating potassium
packed picks such as bananas, cantaloupe and oranges may help
you to be less prone to high blood pressure. In addition,
reducing sodium intake and taking other heart healthy steps
will also help to manage your blood pressure. Gosh I was
young, maybe about 6 years old and was tagging along with my
older brother playing golf and I just so happened to get too
close to him when he was teeing off and got hit with a backswing
right in the nose and from then on that's when the problem
started. Joey came and see me because he can't breathe through
his nose so he has to breathe through his mouth. He doesn't
sleep well at night. He snores a lot and that makes him tired all
the time. You know you would sleep through the night but wake
up and not feel rested, you know even though you made it through
a whole night and got a whole night of sleep, you just wake up
and feel like gosh I really don't even feel like I slept at
all. When we examined Joey we noticed that the wall in the
middle of his nose, what we call a septum that separates the left
and the right side was crooked and in his case was crooked on
the right side you know causing him problems to breathe through
his nose. And we agreed upon a treatment plan that consists of
first a surgery to correct his septum to straighten up his
septum so to improve the nasal airway. Very simple outpatient,
you know everything was explained to me. Go in in the
morning. I actually took a little nap right before surgery
because it was early in the morning, woke up and that was
it. So it was real simple, real easy. Joey's quality of life has
improved tremendously. He breathes better, he sleeps
better and he enjoys life more. Well you know, you just don't
realize because I've had it for so many years, you just get used
to it. You're thinking the way you're breathing is normal and
it's not. And then once it's changed the way it is, you know
I'm able to do things without getting winded, you know because
I'm not having to open my mouth to breathe now. I mean, I can
breathe clear through my nose. The number one reason that
patients come and see me is because they can't breathe
through their nose. In most of the cases, there's a solution
for that. As a center of excellence in nose and sinus
disease, I'm always in the forefront of medical research to
improve my patient outcome. Medicine has advanced so much
that there's always a solution to breathe well and live well.
Patients don't have to suffer any more. For more information
and to check out hundreds of videos, head to our website,
bestdocsnetwork.com. And up next we have oral surgeon, Dr. Paul
Metz. My teeth needed to all be extracted, they were crumbling,
they were breaking, I couldn't chew my food. He's a
professional, an accountant and he's certainly concerned about
finances and how to structure his budget and he was the guy
that his lower teeth were worse off than the uppers. And so that
was an area that he decided to focus on. I guess this started
in 2009 and this really happened in kind of in two settings so
that in 2009 we did the lower and in 2011 we did the upper.
The bottom is all done and I'm in the midst of having the
prosthesis on the top done. And also with David his concern
regarding his budget. We were able to do this without
grafting. Previously in the upper jaw because of the
maxillary sinuses we would have to graft those areas in the
majority of cases that we were replacing a full jaw worth of
implants. But with the advent of cone beam CT we are able to look
at individuals from a 3 dimensional standpoint radio
graphically ahead of time so as to know where the bone is so
that we can position implants within that bone and avoid the
need for sinus grafting and subsequently lower his overall
cost significantly as well as increase the predictability. No
longer do I have to make sure that everything is in place
where it's supposed to be in place. It's, I have, I have a
new chance at a brand new set of teeth and they don't hurt. It's
satisfying to see him come back smiling, see him walking down
the hallway standing upright with their chin up, smiling and
being much more confident so from a psychological standpoint
outside of the health benefits that you see, the mental health
benefits are significant. I'm a CPA, I meet with clients and
high net worth clients. Appearance is important to me,
it's certainly not of the utmost importance, but it's important
to me and I don't want to be embarrassed by a crumbling
smile. It's a wonderful, wonderful solution. Adding raw
or lightly cooked garlic and onions to your meals may keep
you healthy. Both foods appear to possess antiviral and
antibacterial properties and are believed to boost your immune
system. Mr. Webber, you know, basically he came in with
typical symptoms of plantar fasciitis. It hurts in the
morning or you know I can't play golf because I'm just always in
pain. Plantar fasciitis if anyone has ever had it is pretty
painful, very painful, especially getting up in the
morning. Plantar fasciitis is a pain that honestly in my
practice I probably see 10 to 15 times a day. So typically
someone complains about that first step in the morning when
they get down. When you bear weight, okay, your arch actually
collapses and your foot gets longer and this ligament like
structure that's on the bottom of the heel pulls from the heel
bone. So when it pulls from the heel bone you get inflammation.
Inflammation triggers the pain cycle so essentially you know
every time that you're bearing weight you're restarting the
pain cycle and so it's chronically inflamed tissue on
the bottom of the heel. Well I have to say that this procedure
is really amazing. After the recovery time from the surgery
it really is immediate relief, immediate. The tenex procedure
is basically it's an ultrasonic device that allows you to
debride the scar tissue. So when you have plantar fasciitis or
any kind of inflammation of a tendon you develop scar tissue
and so using ultrasound for guidance, using like a micro tip
you're able to debride the scar tissue, remove it and basically
you know start the healing process. The key feature about
it is that it's, you know, a single incision, one suture and
the patient can weight bear, you know, immediately after. So it's
cutting edge technology combined with minimal, you know, incision
surgery. It's really remarkable. I mean truly, truly remarkable.
I don't have any pain in the area that it affected me. It was
really, truly amazing. It's a 15 minute procedure. It's very
precise because you're using an ultrasound machine for guidance
so you can actually visualize the plantar fascia. And it's
minimal incision, literally just one suture on the inside of the
heel. So it's not on a weight bearing part so you can
immediately weight bear after the surgery. Patients love it so
I love having this as a new thing I can introduce in my
practice. That's going to wrap up today's episode of Best Docs
Network, the show featuring some of the best doctors in the
Houston area that are really changing people's lives. For
more information and to check out hundreds of videos, head to
our website, bestdocsnetwork.com. And if you
have questions or comments we would love to hear from you,
send us an email at info@bestdocsnetwork.com. I'll
see you next week.