Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 30, 2010
Importance of thoracic health spans past, present, future
Erica Tuggle
Thoracic surgeon, Dr. Robert Headrick, stands beside the first heart-lung machine purchased by the citizens of Chattanooga 50 years ago to combat the congenital heart defects the community’s children were facing. Chattanooga ranks in the highest for mortality and number of smokers with lung cancer and, Headrick says, he wants to offer preventative advice against diseases of this kind to his hometown in order to give back his knowledge and skills to the community that has given much to him.
- Erica Tuggle
Chattanooga will soon celebrate 50 years of heart surgery saving lives in the community. Part of this recognition of current progress in the field lends itself to pay homage to the medical professionals of past and present that work tirelessly to keep everything pumping.
Dr. James Robert Headrick, a thoracic surgeon who grew up along the Chickamauga Lake shoreline in Harrison, shares the history with the profession that spans back to before Headrick was born when his father, also a thoracic surgeon, was doing some of the first heart surgeries of Chattanooga.
With both parents in the medical field, Headrick says he was the most outspoken in his family against going into medicine. His love of science, physics, and flight led him down a different path to earn an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and his pilot’s license. He took a break from school and pursued both these interests, while still trying to avoid medicine.
Headrick says, “The reality that came back to me was that those were all ways to avoid the mental and physical commitment that medicine takes. At end of day, I sorted it out for myself and saw medicine was what I wanted to do.”
Attending medical school in Memphis, general surgery training in Chattanooga and then the Mayo Clinic for thoracic surgery training, he then returned to Chattanooga to practice at the Alliance of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Surgeons.
These days, he says the majority of the challenges in his field stem from developing less invasive surgery procedures and taking out the pain and suffering from the process, but he credits his father’s generation as the real pioneers of the profession.
In the 1950s, when heart surgery was evolving, most heart surgery was geared towards those with congenital heart defects, he says. The sad truth of that time was that children born with an abnormal heart were given a death sentence.
“People were approaching a part of the body that we didn’t have answers for and trying things out of desperation,” he says.
IBM and General Motors were trying to design a machine that would stabilize the blood while the heart was operated on, but it was the Mayo Clinic that took the two machines and put them together to save four out of eight patients who went through the first machine trial in 1955. Saving half of these individuals was a big step, Headrick says, as before this all of the children would have died due to their disease.
Soon after, in 1960, the people of Chattanooga called for their own machine and, through the local chapter of the American Heart association, they raised money and bought this machine in a time so primitive in technology that the country hadn’t even gone to the moon yet, he says. A heart surgeon from Vanderbilt was recruited to do the first heart surgery in Chattanooga, in what was to be the second heart surgery in the state. Headrick’s father was finishing his training at the time before joining the thoracic surgery team in Chattanooga.
These days, congenital heart surgery has become so sophisticated that it is only done in major medical centers, Headrick says. Nearly all the work done in Chattanooga now is on adults for the hardening of the arteries or diseases due to age. One of the big problems in the area is lung cancer, something Headrick says he is passionate about getting the information out about.
“In Chattanooga, we are sitting in a hot bed for cancer,” he says. “Tennessee’s statistics for lung cancer survival lags behind the rest of the country.”
Perhaps, one of the reasons Headrick is passionate about lung cancer is due to his time at the Mayo Clinic, where he learned to care for patients simply as human beings, even though famous individuals from all over the world were a common sight there.
“The biggest thing about the Mayo Clinic is despite all [the celebrities they care for], they really just focus on treating everyone as human beings. They had huge importance on teamwork, patient privacy and focus of professionals to be completely patient oriented,” he says.
As an example, he cites a patient who came in with a lung mass, throat and head cancer whom he walked several flights to reach, because the Mayo’s policy was that the specialist came to the patient. Outside the room, Headrick says he was presented with the patient’s information and condition, but with no previous mention of the person’s identity, he entered the room to find himself speaking with famous musician and Beatle George Harrison.
Headrick says that Harrison was treated as a patient like any other the entire time and calls him an interesting individual, and a person who had experienced much.
“He joked around as any patient who potentially has cancer to wish it away or use humor to help feel better about a serious problem,” he says. “When we talked about a breathing tube that would have to go in, and that it might affect his voice for a while, he joked, ‘Well, I was never the one with the good voice.’”
Headrick says he also identified with Harrison’s statement that, “Hospitals are bad places to heal.” Places for healing require soft lighting, quiet, nutrition, but most hospitals are the opposite of this, Headrick and Harrison agreed. Headrick says now he tries to carry this philosophy along, and make changes to make the locations of surgery recovery a place of healing.
In attempting to make his hometown a place of healing, Headrick says that Tennessee and Chattanooga needs to be healthier, and he would like to help in the changes to make it so. The newly finished operating room at Memorial Hospital is trying to change the whole experience of how a person comes into the operating room with elements of pleasant scenery, soft lighting, music, and all the latest technology for less recovery time, he says.
“Part of this is just educating people and to get them to do more preventative care and take charge of their own medical issues to hopefully give back to a town that gave a lot to me,” he says.
A physician at the Mayo
Clinic said moving to Chatta-nooga would be easier work, but Headrick says he disagrees.
“At Mayo, you operate and they leave, but it is much tougher when it is a human being who means something to you who you shop and eat with, your family knows and you see them where you live,” he says.
Headrick encourages his community members to be diligent in yearly physicals, listen to the body’s subtle clues and to know that the fear and pain of surgery has changed for the better.
Along with this, Headrick says, “This process is what I brought back here: you put the patient first and treat them as human beings. With this approach, I think you will always end up serving mankind better and on the right side of the fence. The rest will fall into place.”
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