The Turning Point
by Edward Martin
businessnc.com

His heart failing, a writer finds cutting-edge medicine in a place where basic care once was hard to come by.

It’s dark. I try to move, but I’m wrapped like a mummy in warming blankets. A second ago, it seems, it was daylight and a nurse was asking me my name. Tubes protrude from my right side. They feel like garden hoses. Smaller ones sprout from my arms. One is in the big vein in my neck, the one that bulges when I laugh, except I don’t laugh as much as I used to, before my heart began failing. I free my left hand and wave feebly. “You want to know what time it is?” a nurse softly asks. I blink. “Eleven o’clock.” It’s night? Seven or eight hours must have passed.

For many of them, I learn later, a surgeon with thin gray hair and sharp blue-gray eyes bent over me. They had deflated my lungs, and through a four-inch incision under my right breast he tunneled through my chest. Bypass surgery six years ago had left dense scar tissue. Beyond it lay my motionless heart. “We can fix it,” he had told me a few weeks before, “if we can get to it.” He would use a tiny camera and lights, long endoscopic scalpels like stainless-steel chopsticks and perhaps the robot they call da Vinci.

They had chilled my body core to about 80 degrees, nearly halting my metabolism. In nature, I would be dying of hypothermia, but here a machine oxygenated and circulated my blood. The surgeon’s progress slowed. Though he had pioneered robotic and minimally invasive heart surgery, he had warned me this might happen.

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Medical school growth focus of ECU, UNC-CH

By Jimmy Ryals
The Daily Reflector

Monday, February 25, 2008

After several decades as sometimes testy sister institutions, East Carolina University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have built a successful partnership.

Since 2004, the pairing has yielded a cardiovascular institute and dental school in Greenville, a cancer hospital and dental expansion in Chapel Hill, and new cancer partnerships between the universities' medical schools.

Filling needs - Medical school expansion worth exploration

Editorial
The Daily Reflector

Sunday, February 17, 2008

When East Carolina University founded its medical school in the 1970s, it did so with the intention of improving access to health care in one of the state's poorest regions. In the three decades since, residents of eastern North Carolina have been fortunate to see the dramatic expansion of medical services, thanks in large measure to the men and women who hold East Carolina medical degrees.

Medicare Won't Pay Hospitals for Errors

By LAURAN NEERGAARD
Feb 18, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — It's a new way to push for patient safety: Don't pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.

That has the nation's hospitals exploring innovative programs to prevent injury and infection: Hand-washing spies. Surgical sponges that sound an alarm if left in the body. Even a room sterilizer that promises to wipe out bacteria left lurking on bedrails.

ECU announced enrollment task force

ECU News Bureau

GREENVILLE(Jan. 30, 2008)—East Carolina University has announced the formation of a task force on strategic enrollment management to develop goals and plans that will determine what its student body will look like in coming years.

“We have been the fastest-growing public university in North Carolina for the last five years,” Chancellor Steve Ballard said. “Clearly students and parents all across the state are finding more and more to like about East Carolina, and this is key to our success. Our growth is also illustrative of our historical commitment to access and opportunity.”

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ATS International Conference - San Diego, CA
May 15-20, 2009

________________________________________________________

The Yash P. Kataria IM Research Day is being established to honor the many contributions of Dr. Yash P. Kataria, and to support the educational and research program in the Department of Medicine at the Brody School of Medicine at ECU. The annual Internal Medicine Research Day will be held this year on Thurs April 23rd at BSOM and the keynote speaker will be Dr. Randy Jirtle.

Dr. Kataria continues to contribute actively to the clinical, educational, and research mission of the pulmonary & critical care division at BSOM. He was the first pulmonologist in eastern NC and helped to establish the pulmonary specialty at BSOM 30 years ago and has been an integral force since the inception of the medical school. Yash was the first division chief of pulmonary medicine at BSOM and successfully recruited and established a clinical and active laboratory research program. Yash is of course known regionally, nationally, and internationally for his passion in translational research with a particular focus on sarcoidosis. Over his 30 year career, he has cared for thousands of patients with sarcoidosis and he arguably has one of the largest sarcoid cohorts in the US. Yash is revered by his patients and families. Yash has literally trained hundreds of medical students and housestaff and is cherished by them as a role model and outstanding teacher at the bedside and in clinics. Yash has been a fixture in the international sarcoid community and has contributed actively at ACCP, ATS, and WASOG. Scientifically, Yash is perhaps best known for promulgating a paradigm shift in our understanding of sarcoid immunology. While it was accepted dogma in the 70s that sarcoidosis was a disease of “depressed immunity” and anergy, Yash proposed and championed the concept that it is a pro-inflammatory disease with involvement of activated T-cells, cytokines, etc. Yash and his group also proposed that the active “sarcoid factor” was localized to the cell walls of alveolar macrophages and monocytes (this remains an intriguing hypothesis!).

Yash was instrumental in recruiting the new divisional leadership and establishment of a successful translational research program with and carry the trajectory that Yash established.

We are honoring Dr. Kataria by dedicating our annual Medicine Research Day, which he started in 1987, to the Yash P. Kataria IM Research Day. We will continue to build on the tradition of encouraging research by inviting leading guest speakers and facilitating scholarship and interaction by our trainees and faculty.

Run For Respiration 2008

Moye Medical Center
521-A Moye Boulevard
Greenville, NC 27834
View Map

To schedule an appointment
or to get driving directions
to Moye Medical, click here.

ECU Press Release (6/4/07) (Source: ECU Physicians)—Cardiologists, pulmonologists and other East Carolina University physicians are now seeing patients in the new Moye Medical Center, a three-story facility at 521 Moye Blvd.

University officials said the new practice site, which opened today, is one of many steps to move ECU Physicians, the group practice of the Brody School of Medicine at ECU, into modern, expanded sites during the next three years.

In the 43,000-square-foot building, ECU’s cardiology and pulmonary and critical care medicine practices will occupy the 12,637-square-foot first floor. With 19 exam rooms plus special procedure rooms, the facility gives these practices more clinical space than they had before at Medical Pavilion, a facility built in 1966 on West Fifth Street.

Moye Medical's opening featured June 8, 2007 in:

• Health Sciences News
• ECU's Pieces of Eight Faculty/Staff Newsletter
• Greenville's the Daily Reflector

Respiratory in the News

Evidence-Based Articles

Salmeterol and Fluticasone Propionate and Survival in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Peter M.A. Calverley, M.D., Julie A. Anderson, M.A., Bartolome Celli, M.D., Gary T. Ferguson, M.D., Christine Jenkins, M.D., Paul W. Jones, M.D., Julie C. Yates, B.S., and Jørgen Vestbo, M.D., for the TORCH investigators.
[abstract] [Download PDF Full Text]

Pulmonary Embolism an Uncommon Cause of COPD Flare

Our Presenters and Research at CHEST 2007 in Chicago, IL
October 20-25, 2007