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HASTINGS, Neb. (AP) — If there's one thing practicing medicine on four continents has taught Hastings heart specialist Dr. Mukesh Garg, it is that the best tools of the trade are still his ears and what lies between them.
Garg, 51, has treated patients in his native country, India, as well as the United Kingdom, U.S. and East Africa, completing residencies in the first three. He has taught and been taught at some of the world's most distinguished schools, including Mid-America Heart Institute at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.
Yet it was as a fledgling doctor serving in Tanzania in 1984 that he learned some of his most important lessons on life, humanity and medicine, lessons that continue to impact the way he practices medicine today, the Hastings Tribune reported.
During his two years of treating impoverished patients during the height of the AIDS outbreak, he was cut off from access to the latest medical technology. His tools of practice were restricted to what he had learned in medical school in India and a stethoscope.
And while he believes CT scans, nuclear cardiology and other advanced methods of testing have their place in medicine, he continues to rely on good, old-fashioned examination skills to anchor his basic treatment regimen when seeing patients as interventional cardiologist at Nebraska Heart Institute on the Mary Lanning Healthcare campus.
"Going to East Africa was a good experience," he said. "It helped me to look at disease from a very different perspective, to be able to diagnose and treat patients with very little help from modern techniques.
"Although my training was in a Third World country, I was fortunate to have quite a few pieces of equipment and medications available to me during my training. But then to utilize all the tricks of the trade without using much of technology, just using your stethoscope and your brains to try to figure things out, was a unique experience which I think gave me very early on a very good hands-on training on how to put your hand on a person's pulse, listen with your stethoscope, and make a diagnosis, rather than depend on an echocardiogram or CT scanner to give you the diagnosis on paper. That has been a very useful part of the training and experience that I have as a physician today."
The former chief of cardiology at University of Missouri in Kansas City, Garg returned to school at Yale in 2009 to receive the training necessary to handle all aspects of cardiology from start to finish. Not content to specialize in any one cardiovascular discipline, his accreditation obtained from Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut enables him to perform actual procedures instead of referring patients on to another cardiologist for treatment.
"I didn't want to be just sitting in a room reading studies," he said. "I wanted to see patients and be involved with them from the beginning to the end.
"That is the reason I chose to be at a place like the Nebraska Heart Institute, to be in a place like Hastings, where I know that patients really need to have cardiology care and appreciate that the care can be provided locally from beginning to end. They don't need to go anywhere else or seek out another cardiologist or cardiology institution to get that complete care from A to Z. That is my aim: to be the complete cardiologist."
Garg and his wife, Dr. Shamila Garg, medical oncologist at Mary Lanning, arrived in Hastings in December 2013 and have been working on the same campus since. The couple has two adult children in medical school and looks forward to becoming a fixture in the Hastings community for years to come.
"We have made Mary Lanning our home," he said. "It's a very friendly place. We have found the people to be very friendly, and they have welcomed us and made us a part of them with open arms. We are very happy to be here.
"I feel like I do make a difference, and that is very important to me. There are thousands and thousands of physicians who people have the luxury of choosing from, but for me to be at a place where I know my being here is making a difference has been a very gratifying experience."
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Information from: Hastings Tribune, http://www.hastingstribune.com
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