Best Docs Network Nashville March 2 2013

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. Hi again everyone, Jim Knox along with Kandace Krueger and welcome back to another edition of the Best Docs Network featuring some of the best physicians in the entire middle Tennessee area that have helped change people’s lives. Like our first doctor endodontist Dr. Graham Locke. I was experiencing some difficulty with some pain in my tooth. It was just a feeling, it wasn’t really painful but it was just, I just knew it was there. When you look at the x-rays in Jean’s case, it looks pretty standard, a silver filling, not a lot of gross decay or anything along those lines. Constantly we have to monitor and test and diagnose exactly what’s going on because symptoms are coming from somewhere and x-rays are 2 dimensional and only one of the tests of many different tests that we use to determine whether a tooth is infected and needing a root canal. I’d never had a root canal before and I was you know a little nervous about it. So he explained to me about IV sedation and I decided that that was probably a really viable option for me. Some people just require the local anesthesia, some require the gas, some want oral sedation and some want IV sedation. We tailor the sedation, whatever it might be to that person’s needs. One of the benefits in this office you know was she never felt the injections in her mouth, she never felt claustrophobic under the rubber down and it allows us to do that more thoroughly as well as protect the airway. When I was given the IV I did feel the initial prick and that was the only thing that I felt from then on. Working under the microscope once we removed the silver filling, we found a crack and there was a slight vertical crack in her tooth that did not show up on the x-ray, so using the microscope you can see down the root canal system many times to the tip of the root internally. It’s almost as if you’re inside the tooth walking around and without that you don’t have that benefit, it’s a guess. The procedure was completed and afterwards I was awake, I was aware of what was going on around me. I was wheeled in the wheelchair into a privacy elevator towards the back of the office and taken downstairs and my husband was in the car waiting for me and I was helped into the car and we went home. I am a world series champion. I am a husband. I am an advocate. I’m in the fight for colorectal cancer because I lost both of my parents to this disease. Because of my friend who died 120 days after his diagnosis. As a survivor I want to spread the word so everyone out there knows the importance of early screening for colorectal cancer. One simple test could save your life or someone you love. Get screened. Be a part of one million strong. We are one million strong. Lisa weighed over 300 pounds but look at her now. She credits Dr. Olsen in helping her change her life. To find out more about Lisa’s story and other life changing stories, log on to bestdocsnetwork.com. I came to Dr. Gilmer in January of 07 and I was wanting a cosmetic fix for what was going on in my neck area. We talked about realistically what he could do and realistically what it would look like. That was very important. You know you want your doctor to listen to you and Dr. Gilmer does that. The neck lift consists of several procedures. You can do something minimally such as laser which will tighten the neck to about 20 to 30 per cent of the results of a true neck lift. You could do a neck lift where you make the incisions starting at the earlobes around behind your ears into the hairline where you undermine the skin and you pull up the excess skin. And then the most complicated would be doing a midline platysmal plication at the same time you do these other procedures. One of the reasons why I did come to Dr. Gilmer is because he has his own operating room and recovery area and I was able to stay overnight with a nurse. It made getting over the surgery, the initial getting over the surgery just fabulous. You do not have to go to a hospital. You don’t have to deal with different nurses coming in and out every three or four hours. You have the same nurse all night long. Very comforting. The perfect patient, you’ve got a nice L shaped strut, the muscles are tight and they’re not hanging and they’re not loose. And we elected on Pam to do the neck lift, the midline platysmal plication and the laser to give her absolutely what we consider would be the best result for her. I found myself looking in the mirror to the side, looking at the side just to see how good it looked and I knew that if that surgery had come out the way I hoped it did and it did that I would be back again for other procedures. I think I look great. My name is Katy Epley and I’m with Musicians On Call and our mission is to bring live and recorded music to the bedsides of patients and healthcare facilities. We’re here tonight taking Ashley Gearing room to room to play music for patients. I’m volunteering tonight here with Musicians On Call. I sometimes may feel a little goofy walking into a room with a guitar by myself but then you see the reaction and you see their expression completely changes. Before I came to Centennial and Dr. Houston I was 335 pounds so I had a lot of trouble if I was out doing anything outside physically as far as being somebody that could go long distances or do things for the children. We went to Universal Studios and to Disney World and of course the big thing at Universal is the Harry Potter ride, the Harry Potter theme park and before surgery I could not ride that ride, I was too big. Well the first step is we like to see all patients come through our informational seminars. It really goes A-Z about bariatric surgery, what it entails, what the risk of the surgery are, what the outcomes are and what to expect long term. And then once they get through that process they come to our office and we spend an hour, hour and a half going through what their medical conditions are, what surgery might fit them best, try to mold one of the four surgeries in to their eating habits, their age, their medical problems and try to find which one you know suits them better and which one they're more comfortable with. Once you make that decision to have the surgery, I mean it’s a permanent lifestyle change that you’ve got to embrace. We have wonderful dietitians on staff, exercise physiologists, we have support groups, we have psychological aftercare programs to help the patients deal with the emotional side of eating. Having that motivator with the surgery and knowing that by doing the extra exercises obviously going to increase and make your weight loss you know a success. You have the exercise physiologist here that you know works with you to make sure that you’re doing what you need to do. The nutritionist is certainly going to help to lay out a plan for you, what you can eat, things you need to avoid. And both of those things you have access to even if you’re not in an appointment you can call up here and talk to them, you can email them. If you need to stop by while you’re in Nashville, you can certainly make an appointment with them. That is a huge plus that you have here at Centennial. Six months out I’ve lost 145 pounds and I was telling my wife the other night who weighs less than that you know I said just to think that I used to carry you plus some around. I said you know now I struggle just to pick you up and hold you up in the air for thirty seconds you know and now whenever I hit my one year mark in October my wife and I both are going down for the surgiversary. That’s what I’m going to treat myself to is riding the Harry Potter ride. I was 21 years old when I was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and when you confront your own mortality you realize what am I going to leave behind? I’m never going to have children, I might not see my husband grow old, what have I done? I’m sitting here today with tumors in my liver, my lungs and my bones. But I’m sitting here with hope. My name is Bridget Spence. I am Susan G. Komen For The Cure. Help cure breast cancer and save women’s lives. You hear a lot about sleep apnea. Well sleep apnea is different than snoring. Snoring is just when you make a lot of noise but your oxygen levels don’t fall to dangerous levels. Sleep apnea is when your oxygen levels do fall because not only do you snore but you gasp. Basically you snore so bad or your airway closes so much that your oxygen level goes down and your body therefore raises you up into a lighter level of sleep so that you don’t die from that low oxygen level. That’s when you chortle or gasp and you start breathing well again. Sleep apnea is a bad disease. It happens a lot in obese people, people with thick necks and it can result in a far higher frequency of auto accidents. It can result in hypertension, low testosterone levels, depression and we think even certain cancers. Now how can you tell if you have sleep apnea? Well ask your bed partner if you gasp, that would be suggested. Ask your bed partner if your snoring is worse and worse and you can get a little finger test done by your physician where you wear a little monitor on your finger overnight and see where your oxygen levels go throughout the night. If your oxygen levels go low, that’s sleep apnea. I had had four previous back surgeries before coming to Dr. Babat. I walked around fourteen months bent over at the waist. I couldn’t look up at the ground, I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, I couldn’t stand straight. Failed back syndrome is a term that we can use to apply to anybody who’s had an operation on their back or in more general terms anywhere in their spine that hasn’t worked out very well. For some people they’ve never had any relief from the operation. For others they had several months of significant relief and then the results deteriorate and often they’re left worse off than they were before they started the whole process. My previous back surgeon did not want me to have another surgery right away but Dr. Babat when I came here said that there was some hardware that was the wrong size in my body, it was protruding, causing an issue so it needed to come out immediately and then he would have to rebuild my back so we did that within two weeks of my first visit here. Caroline had three or four operations on her spine before she got here. In her case it was a combination of a couple of fusions that hadn’t taken, one or two fusions that had taken but were not in an ideal position and then some additional problems that had developed as a result of that. So to solve this problem, we actually needed to extend her fusion considerably higher but dramatically realign her spine. Dr. Babat I can’t say enough about. He absolutely has done what he said he would do. He told me upfront, this is what you can expect. This is the quality of life you can expect. You’re going to have a problem the rest of your life but it’s going to be a much better situation than what you’ve had. The first time I was up out of the bed here at the hospital I was able to stand up straight. I was able to see myself in the mirror for the first time in fourteen months, I could stand up straight. In Caroline’s case I’m delighted. She seems to be very happy. Certainly her level of function and pain have changed significantly. This is just in my opinion a wild success for a wonderful woman. These are complex problems to diagnose, to really figure out how to fix and then difficult operations to do. But frankly it’s why I get up in the morning and why I went to med school. The opportunity to help people like this is just again makes everything worthwhile. Dr. Babat does do what he says he will do. If I need him for anything, all I do is make a phone call. Dr. Babat and his staff here, they have been immensely great to me. As always for more information on any of the amazing doctors you’ve seen on today’s show just logon to our website, bestdocsnetwork.com. Best Docs Network of course is the number one medical video source as far as educating the public. Right now time for our next best doctor, it’s Dr. Peter Kroll. I was prescribed some medicines and it, I had a reaction to it. It weakened the muscles in my back and I ended up being out of work probably out seven months. I had surgery on my neck, they put a bracket to fuse some joints in my neck but I still had trouble with my lower back. I was unable to stand up right. The surgeon said there wasn’t much they could do so they recommended pain management so that’s when I met Dr. Kroll. I told him that I needed some help with the pain but I didn’t want to be, you know, medicated to the point that I was just sitting in a chair and staring out the window. In Michael’s case, he has lumbar spondylosis or what we call facet arthropathy or facet syndrome. He’s been through multiple treatments and pain management including medications and physical therapy. Then Michael has undergone radiofrequency ablation in his lumbar spine with significant response. Radiofrequency ablation is a procedure that we utilize in pain management and this procedure involves placing a needle inside the patient in a very specific area where the nerve is traveling. It goes to the arthritic area or the facet and this needle then is heated at the very tip by a radio frequency energy device that basically destroys the nerve with heat. That relieved a lot of the pain and since then he’s been doing that probably every year, I guess the last six or seven years. And he’s been able to reduce the amount of pain medications that he takes. He describes increased activity and his quality of life with his family activities and it’s been very successful for him. All in all he’s helped me where my wife and I can get out and walk and most people don’t know that I’m really being treated for pain management. Dr. Kroll has given me the ability to have quality of life even though I’ve got a lot of restrictions with my back. Dana was in a great deal of pain until she met Dr. Kroll. To find out more about Dana’s story and other life changing stories, logon to bestdocsnetwork.com, that’s bestdocsnetwork.com. Well the tuba augmentation is probably the latest technique for inserting breast implants either premuscular or submuscular. That means on top of the muscle or underneath the muscle and it’s going through the belly button or the embalacus and it’s called tuba which means transumbilical breast augmentation. And by going through the belly button the operation is quicker, its less painful, less complications, has no scars on the chest. I have been to Dr. Gilmer several times. I’ve had a tummy tuck. I have had liposuction. There was one thing missing. I had to get breast implants. I told him oh I wanted to be a small C , this is what I wanted. He looked at me and he said Keisha, you’re going to need more than a small C because I had lost so much weight and had so much skin. He told me what I was going to have, he told me what to expect so that it wasn’t such a shock to me when I woke up and here they were. And you go from having nothing to hello. If a patient wants a silicone implant inserted, you can’t put a silicone implant through the embalacus, it has to be a saline implant. And when we talk to the patient about it we tell them how we’re going to do it. By making an incision around the embalacus we will create a tunnel and then create a pocket either above the muscle or below the muscle to insert the implant. We put sizers in. And sizers are like implants that we put in, blow up, check out the pocket, make sure the pocket’s correct. We’ll remove the sizers and then the regular implant is deflated and we roll it up like a little taco and slide it into the pocket that we’ve developed into the larger pocket for the implant. And then we have an inflation valve. We inflate the implant to the size that we think’s appropriate. And then we pull the inflation valve out. After the surgery, I woke up, looked down, and of course there they were. The gift that he gave me and I thought it was the best thing ever. I am pleased with everything. He has really truly given me what I have dreamed of and what I thought I could never have. My name is Katy Epley and I’m with Musicians On Call and our mission is to bring live and recorded music to the bedsides of patients and healthcare facilities. We’re here tonight taking Ashley Gearing room to room to play music for patients. I’m volunteering tonight here with Musicians On Call. I sometimes may feel a little goofy walking into a room with a guitar by myself but then you see the reaction and you see their expression completely changes. My job is a guitar player for Mark Chesnutt and back in January I noticed that I was starting to have some leg pain, some nerve pain shooting down my whole leg which was causing me trouble to get around, trouble on stage, I was limping. Delaney came to see me early this spring. He was having a tremendous amount of pain in his back and particularly his left leg and this was really causing him some problems. He was even having to start taking some narcotics. We took some x-ray’s in the office and it actually showed that he was born with a weakening in his bone that allowed the bone to slip forward in his lower part of his spine which kinked off the nerves which created that tremendous leg pain he was having. When I arrived here to see Dr. Burval on my first visit he was very explanatory, he would sit down with me and in layman’s terms tell me exactly what was going on, what was going to have to happen, what we could do to extend my wait time before I had surgery. He said I would definitely have to have surgery, just a matter of when. We worked together, he was on tour a lot, he couldn’t take a lot of time away from surgery. We really tried to get him better and functional without doing surgery first. We did some exercises and physical therapy to get his back muscles strong trying to stabilize that back. We did some nerve injections trying to get that nerve to shrink to calm down a little bit so that pain in the leg would go away. And it did help him temporarily. He was able to complete a tour during the summer without any neurological consequences and then we ultimately decided that surgery was best for him to give him a permanent cure, get him back into his life and we did surgery later this year. In August, August the 14th as a matter of fact I had surgery. I was in the hospital for recovery for four days which he expected me to be there longer but released me. Five weeks later he releases me to go back to work and he told me you are way ahead of the curve, I am very impressed. I am very pleased with how Delaney did. He gave 100 percent effort just like I give 100 percent effort and we got a great outcome out of it. I am fortunate enough to be back on the road doing my thing picking and grinning and I’m loving every minute of it. If you’ve had a doctor help change your life we’d love to hear about it. Send us an email at info@bestdocsnetwork.com. I am a world series champion. I am a husband. I am an advocate. I’m in the fight for colorectal cancer because I lost both of my parents to this disease. Because of my friend who died 120 days after his diagnosis. As a survivor I want to spread the word so everyone out there knows the importance of early screening for colorectal cancer. One simple test could save your life or someone you love. Get screened. Be a part of one million strong. We are one million strong. I was in the military. I was in aviation the majority of my time that I was in the military. I went through you know normal training exercises that I went through, crash landed a few times and the third one was the charm that really messed me up. I had fusion done because of that in my neck and then later on down the years arthritis and everything started setting in. I was you know really in a lot of pain, mood swings were bad. Mr. Costello was an amazing case. He had a myriad of really significant symptoms of pain throughout his neck and lower back. And upon his initial presentation to CPS we evaluated him which included a really thorough history and physical review of systems and we felt that at that time that he could receive excessive reduction in his pain from the elective epidural steroid injections. The ESI’s were explained to me by Dr. Arney that basically what they’re going to do is they’re going to inject medicine into my spinal cord and that should hopefully alleviate a lot of the pain that I was having which it did do that. Since that point in time we have since performed three separate epidural steroid injections in the lumbar region all of which he has received quite adequate to significantly superior relief of his pain. Prior to me going in there I was having a hard time sleeping at night, I’ve had fits to where I couldn’t sit for a while, I couldn’t stand. It basically was dragging me down. Since then since I’ve had the treatments and that, I’m not as edgy any more, able to walk farther. Basically it’s been a turnaround for me. I’m going up instead of down now. We’re just the tool that really helps these folks that are inflicted with back pain and I have been fortunate enough to meet individuals such as Mr. Costello and I’m really happy to report that he has seemingly really had a lot of success in relief of his pain. And the important part of that is that Mr. Costello now is in our opinion able to enjoy his life more which is really the ultimate objective. Pain relief is fantastic. Dr. Arney has a great bedside manner, he talks to you like a human being. He’s not happy unless you’re happy. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, both of my daughters were pregnant and everything I was looking forward to turned into everything I was going to miss. First words, first steps, being there for my grandchildren, for my daughters. Today, those babies are three. I'm with them all the time. I don't know what's next but I know I'm here today. My name is Alantheia Pena. I am Susan G. Komen For The Cure. Help cure breast cancer and save women's lives. I had my surgery at a very early age considering the time of which I had my surgery, I was 26 at the time. And I come from a family of obese individuals and have lots of complications, Diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease and I had tried every diet. I hit 200 pounds when I was 12 years old and I never left. The ideal candidate for bariatric surgery is a patient that has body mass index greater than 40, medical conditions related to morbid obesity, failure of medical treatment, dietary behavior modification. I had never had surgery before. This was my first experience ever having anesthesia or having surgery. I had a ton of support from other bariatric patients from the faculty here at Centennial and from my family as well. She continues not to follow up so much with the physicians office because she’s doing great in not having any medical conditions but she does continue to come to support group, meet with the dieticians and exercise physiology and group follow up. The after care support groups here are phenomenal. It really means a lot to the patients to be able to sit in a room with people who have been where I have been and people who have experienced the same things that I have. It’s also nice on the post op side to be able to come back and support those patients that are at an earlier stage in their journey and to be able to pay it forward to those other patients. Paula had great results with her gastric bypass and it was the best operation for her after we had had our initial consultation she’s had very good weight loss and I think Paula’s also had plastic surgery procedures to remove some of her excess weight. And so she has continued to you know keep her weight off. She has remained active and healthy and off many medications that she was taking prior to surgery. I went zip lining in Mexico and I looked at the sign and thought two years ago I would have exceeded that weight limit and would have to sit here while everybody else had fun so it has opened up a whole new world and a whole new life that I never would have known before. That’ll do it, that’ll wrap up another edition of the Best Docs Network featuring some of the best doctors in the middle Tennessee area that of course Kandace have helped change people’s lives. And for more information on any of our doctors just logon to our website bestdocsnetwork.com. If you have a question or comment for us of course we’d love to hear from you, send us an email at info@bestdocsnetwork.com. That’s right, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next week.