Trailer: Heart-to-Heart With World-Renowened Heart and Cardiovascular Expert Dr. Mandeep Mehra, MD

[Music] when my mother collapsed in my own arms abruptly and I could not resuscitate her even after having been known as a clinician in the community who was saving lives day in and day out heart transplantation artificial heart pumps but I could not save my own mother and that degree of helplessness is something that has stayed with me all my life and it always conditions me to look at Patients individually and look at them with great great attention to their own personal stories because within their own personal stories going deeper than just a simple diagnostic of a disease itself is where the answers are often found particularly in situations where we still have lesser understanding of human suffering one of the biggest challenges that I see with our patients is the behavioral tendency to deny and say stay in a state of denial about the attribution of their symptoms or the possibility of disease if we have a headache we always just say oh you know I think it's eye strain if we have uh pain in the chest instead of saying it's pain in the chest doctor try and tell me why it is I'll try and say I think it was my muscle that was hurting or I think I may have stretched my arm a little bit too much so this attribution of denial is a big challenge for us and in fact I know of cardiologists who have ignored their symptoms while they were working and have then come to me with weakened heart muscles because they ignored a heart attack the future of Heart Care is uh immense first there is a genetic Revolution now where we can in fact use genetic scissors to change the human genome in a way as to abolish various heart diseases we're already at the precipice of disruption in that uh Arena and the next decade will actually take us very far where we can treat heart disease just simply by doing genetic testing and then modifying the genes to improve the chances of not ever having the disease developed the second area where we see great advances in Heart Care is in device technology we now know that offthe shelf devices for example either for Diagnostic monitoring or for intervention or to the extent of what I practice in which is heart replacement therapy we were always conditioned to replace hearts with a biological human heart but because we don't have enough donors uh to and enough organs we need off-the-shelf technology and using and developing novel biocompatible heart devices that can in fact replace heart function bior robotic hearts for instance is another generational feature that we'll see in our lifetime my understanding is that every human being is also a doctor of heart and you are the lucky one to be the doctor of heart from the Roman itic side in human life as well as well as the real expert on on the heart Our Guest today is world renowned Dr mandip MEA