Over more than 20 years of practicing cardiology, Zachary George, MD, has learned that it’s important also to practice empathy with his patients.
“I’m always reminded of a Robin Williams quote: ‘Everybody that you meet is going through a battle that you know nothing about.”
Dr. George, an interventional cardiologist who recently joined Georgia Heart Institute, keeps those words in mind as he cares for patients.
“After some experience and just generally caring for patients over years, you realize as you age that there’s a lot of gray zone in a lot of things,” he said. “Trying to be a patient’s coach, part of their team, is amazing, and that’s what I try to do. I try to approach patients with all the options and give them the research and science and data so we can decide how to proceed.”
Dr. George keeps that same open-minded approach in how he adopts new technologies and innovations in his practice. As an interventional cardiologist, he specializes in using minimally invasive techniques to treat patients and get them back to their normal lives with less pain and faster recovery times. He has been a site investigator in many clinical studies, and he has been an early adopter of several novel devices and therapies.
“Not that I want to do a bunch of experimental things that haven’t been proven, but there’s a dogma that ‘We’ve always done it this way, don’t question the status quo,’ and that’s very much indoctrinated into medicine,” he said. “But I think that’s very short sighted. When I’ve done clinical research in the past, it has been with the forethought of finding better ways to take care of patients. If patients do better with a certain approach, I think we should adopt that for future patients.”