Meet Dr. Joseph Newton, as he discusses his areas of focus, his path to medicine, his approach to patient care, what brought him to Sentara, and how the field of Cardiac Surgery is evolving.
Hi, my name is Doctor Joseph Newton. I'm the clinical chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Centa heart, my particular um, area of interest uh in both cardiac and thoracic surgery. Uh, it's, it's pretty broad really. Um, almost every aspect of adult cardiac surgery we're involved with. I'm involved with uh whether that's coronary bypass, coronary revascularization. So such as for people who may have heart attacks. Um, but also, so valve surgery, all different types of valve uh operations, different types of approaches to valve operations, um whether it's less invasive trans catheter or open surgical. Uh and also the more complicated uh cases that are combination cases that have several different things that need to be fixed at one time. Uh The broader service that I run uh also does, um, uh we have a very successful heart transplant program. Um, and that's active and busy and, um, enrolls a lot of patients, helps a lot of patients. Um, the heart failure program also, which is uh may lead to a heart transplant, but more often may just be uh supportive care for people, um uh who don't quite need a transplant yet, but who need help and then also I do a fair amount of thoracic surgery or general thoracic surgery, which for people who may have lung cancer or other types of diseases in their chest, not necessarily cardiac. Uh, although sometimes those boundaries, uh, obviously they're close, everything's in the chest. Um, so I do a fair amount of lung surgery and work like that. Also, I, uh, became interested in medicine. Um, probably when I was around 11 or 12, I was a boy scout and I was on the Appalachian trail. Um, and as boys will do, uh, one of my friends was running and slipped on a rock in a stream and fell and cut his head. And it turns out that one of the fathers who was a chaperone on the trip was our town's best surgeon. And so when they called the parents and said, uh, what do you want us to do? Take him to a local hospital or uh doctor? So, and so brought his kid with him and they said, oh, no, I mean, if we were here, we want doctor. So and so, so, so, uh, he laid the boy down on a picnic table and sewed up his forehead and, uh, I watched him all the other boys kind of ran off and I just thought it was absolutely fascinating. Uh, you see a little bit of the fat underneath the skin and a little bit of blood and he put it all back together. Real nice. And I just thought that's amazing. And I, that's really where it started. I just, at that point, I wanted to be actually a surgeon, not a doctor. I wanted to be a surgeon. Well, I think that um when a patient comes to see a specialty surgeon, uh really whether it's cardiac or any other type of specialty surgeon, there are a lot of components um that are important to address. Obviously, they probably initially think of coming to us for, you know, our skill and, and the results that we have and, and they wanna feel better and they wanna get fixed, they wanna get fixed well, uh they wanna feel confident that it's gonna go well. Um But, and, and that's obviously probably the number one thing, but I think that communicating with patients and their families and helping them understand what their problem is, helping them understand how you're going to fix it. Um and going through, you know, all the potential outcomes that they could, they could see, hopefully most of them good. Uh But I think talking through that with them, it takes a little extra time up front. I think it's totally worth it. I think the patients really appreciate it. Uh It solidifies a good relationship with the patient. Um And I think it really helps even in their recovery phase, there's a trust that kind of gets built early on and I would never underestimate that. Um Sometimes again, people who go to high specialty physicians, you know, they just want, you know, the perfect operation and they should get the perfect operation. That's, that's the 1st 10 things. But I think that um communicating with them is also actually really important. Well, I grew up in uh eastern North Carolina and although I did training up and down the east coast, I was at Duke initially and then um up at Mass General in, in Boston, uh I wanted to get more or less back to Mid Atlantic. And um there were people here that had trained where I trained and um I started looking and I liked it. So I've been here ever since the ter hard uh offers a very comprehensive range of cardiac and thoracic services. Um And that's very unique in the region uh even to some extent, even in the state. Um all the way from standard cardiac surgical approaches to revascularization or fixing arteries um that uh may be involved in somebody having a heart attack or hopefully, we can fix them before you have a heart attack to heart valve uh operations. We also do a lot of work on the AORTA, which is the big blood vessel that comes up out of the heart. Um that can have pathology, it can have aneurysms, it can rupture, there's different, there's different timing and ways that we can fix that. There's a nice collaboration that we have with vascular and that whole arena. The heart transplant and heart failure program here is growing and healthy and doing very, very well and helps a lot of people. And again, it's a unique resource in this region. We also do surgical um electrophysiology. Um There are catheter based ways to fix people's, for example, a FB or, or, or ventricular tachycardia. Um But uh we fix those sometimes surgically as well, especially if we have to otherwise do a surgical operation. Uh, and that's a component that we're active in and have people who are good at, um, here to, to offer that. Um, and then of course, general thoracic surgery or surgery of the lung, mostly, uh, for people who have lung cancer, we actually do a fair amount of that also. Yeah, I think the field of cardiac surgery, uh, for me, um, it's absolutely been fascinating. Um, there are some operations that are extremely reliable and successful and, and one of those is coronary bypass surgery. That operation has been around for a long time and there's a reason it's been around a long time because it works very well. It fixes the problem. It's a big operation but it fixes the problem and people get back to normal. Um, and so that part to see, uh, some consistency over decades is interesting while at the same time, it's a field that's had an enormous amount of technological change. So you've got all this going on in this one field. Um, and some of the technological change, um, does center around valves. That's one big area, uh which I know we're gonna talk about separately here in a minute. Um, and, uh, and that's been fascinating, um, even the field of trans catheter valves when I first heard about it. Um, I don't know, 15 to 20 years ago. Um, it was experimental, it was over a dinner at a meeting and the CEO of one of the big companies was telling me and one of my partners what they were working on. And, um, I was just like, hm, that seems like that's gonna work. That, that makes sense to me that that's gonna work. And, uh, of course, it went through 5 to 10 years of research and development and, and even some experimentation in other countries, but it's here now, front and center. And so just to see that evolution over the last few decades, um, and there's so much, uh, R and D that's put into cardiothoracic surgery that, uh, and even on the oncology side, if you're talking about lung cancer, there's been some amazing breakthroughs in immunotherapy. Um, and the combination of immunotherapy with either standard chemotherapy or surgery, um, has been a game changer. It's, um, something that really hit the news earlier this year and we, um, were very early adopter of it and it's, um, it's made a huge difference to some of our patients. So, um, it, it's just a broad field with a lot of cool stuff.
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