Latest update January 19th, 2025 5:16 AM
Healthy lifestyle could help avert some cardiac issues – Overseas doctor
Dr. Debra Isaac
While it is important to have facilities in place that offer treatment to help restore the health of individuals, it is simultaneously imperative that efforts be made to promote measures that can avert, as far as possible, potential ailments.
This notion was recently emphasized by Dr. Debra Isaac who has been lending cardiac care support to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC). She pointed out that while extensive facilities have been put in place to manage cardiac patients there is still need to address the causative factors.
“We need to promote a really good lifestyle…for instance no smoking. If you have high blood pressure you must take your tablets; you must keep your blood pressure under control. You can’t just take your tablets for one week or so and cure the problem…You have to carry on if you have diabetes.
Make sure you are taking your medication and keeping your blood sugar under control,” Dr. Isaac noted. She, however, asserted that there is no substitute for good diet and exercise.
The notion of a healthy lifestyle is continually emphasised by health officials. According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for instance, “living a healthy lifestyle can help keep your blood pressure, cholesterol, and sugar normal and lower your risk for heart disease and heart attack. A healthy lifestyle include: eating a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight, getting enough physical activity, not smoking or using other forms of tobacco and limiting alcohol use.”
But even as it makes the public aware of measures to maintain their health, the Canada-based Dr. Isaac said that the GPHC has been seeing an increasing number of patients with heart conditions for instance.
“Our patient traffic has been very high. If you build it [facility] they will come…We have over 90 percent capacity [utilised] in our [GPHC] cardiac ICU at any one time,” said Dr. Isaac who has been playing a crucial role in delivering cardiac care to patients and education to staffers at the GPHC in the quest to improve the service offered there.
This support has for the past few years been advanced at the GPHC through its Guyana Programme to Advance Cardiac Care (GPACC) which was introduced with the collaboration of the Libin Cardiovascular Institute in Alberta, Canada.
The initiative has allowed for the GPHC to offer a 24-hour Intensive Care Unit to cater to cardiac patients at no cost to them.
Patients who turn up at the hospital arrive at times with chest pains, heart rhythm and heart valve problems, heart failure, and even full-fledge heart attack.
“They come here with the various conditions and we are able to stabilise them. We have a young man in there right now and, he is 16. He has problems because he had rheumatic heart disease. His valves were so bad.
“He had such bad heart failure when I saw him that he wouldn’t have been fit to do an operation or he wouldn’t survive…so we have got him in that unit, we have treated him . We haven’t fixed the valves by medicine but we have made his heart work better. We have made the heart failure less and now we can operate safely,” said Dr. Isaac of the teenage patient during a recent interview.
Amplifying the level of care being offered at the GPHC, Dr. Isaac noted that “we have had patients who came in with heart attacks that got the right treatment to open up the artery in there [Cardiac ICU].
“We are in there and we are monitoring them and putting them on the right medication. We have patients with heart failure that are in there for heart management; we have had patients with really fast heart rhythms that we can shock back into a regular rhythm and three of those were done recently,” disclosed Dr. Isaac.
She has made it clear that the cardiac service that is offered free of cost at the GPHC is in fact on par with what is offered in the developed world. She, however, stressed that embracing measures to prevent such conditions cannot be overemphasised.
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