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Show IHC's Caring Magazine EXCELLENCE: How Patients Benefit from Leading-Edge Medicine atlHC From the earliest days of medicine, physicians have learned from each other. Medical knowledge has gradually grown through the study of patient treatments and outcomes. Today, armed with such tools as sophisticated sophisti-cated computer networks and genetic engineering techniques, physicians are ushering in a new age of medicine. Intermountain Health Care (IHC) is committed to this vision of progress. Our organization brings physicians, nurses, and other caregivers care-givers together and provides them with the data systems and clinical equipment they need to provide the best possible care to patients, to learn from one another, and to advance medical science. IHC creates cre-ates a collaborative environment where clinicians are supported in their quest for knowledge. Residents of the Intermountain area benefit from the leading-edge medicine medi-cine available from physicians at .....nr - "5 t3 IHC. (See page 12 for a description of medical research at IHC.) Here are the stories of several patients. Dealing with Heart Failure As a young father. Brad Price considered con-sidered himself the picture of health. He'd never spent a day in the hospital, so when he experienced experi-enced wheezing and difficulty breathing, he figured it was from a recent cold. "I'd had a cold, and I thought it all of a sudden just moved to my chest," said Brad. What Brad thought would be a routine rou-tine trip to the family doctor for a prescription of antibiotics, however, turned out to be more troubling than just the common cold. After comparing Brad's chest X-ray to one from several months earlier, Brad's doctor discovered his heart had grown a third larger than its original size. Further studies showed Brad had cardiomyopathy (weakened heart muscle) with symptoms of heart failure. After several days in an intensive care unit, Brad was referred to LDS Hospital for possible heart transplantation. trans-plantation. Brad was dumbfounded. "It felt like a chest cold," he said. "When they told me this other stuff, I was in shock." Part of the management of patients in heart failure at IHC hospitals 1 y.hJJK r - includes aggressive drug therapy with careful monitoring of results. Fortunately for Brad, the medications medica-tions did have a positive impact: they reduced his heart size and stabilized sta-bilized his heartbeat, allowing him to return to a normal level of activity. activi-ty. Today, Brad has gone back to work full-time and, with the help of long-term medication, looks forward to raising his family with his wife. "I know these specialists saved my life. I would have been dead," Brad said. "At 28 you never worry about dying. You still feel invincible." Beating Cancer Last year, just after his 18th birthday, birth-day, Michael Bullock was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer. Halfway through his chemotherapy treatment, he needed additional tests. "The doctors told us the results of the gallium scan were unclear and that Michael really real-ly needed a PET scan," said Jennifer Bullock, Michael's mother. A PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanner is a powerful ' 1 |