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- My name is Stephen Ksiazek, and I'm a cardiologist.
I've been practicing here
in the Lehigh Valley since 1999,
and I'm currently with Coordinated Health Cardiology.
And we're seeing patients out of the Bethlehem campus.
We're also working out of Easton Hospital,
which is our tertiary care hospital.
In college I studied mathematics and physics,
and I was always kind of drawn to
things that you could measure, and things
that you could quantitate a little bit more,
so I don't think it's any surprise
that I wound up in cardiology, which I think
is a specialty where measurement,
and more precise kinds of diagnoses are possible.
I grew up in Philadelphia suburbs,
and I went to college at La Salle, my dad taught there.
And after La Salle I went to the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine,
and during that time I was fortunate enough
to be able to do some research along the way.
And after Penn, I decided to see
the other half of the state, so I went
to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
I did my residency and fellowship
in internal medicine and then in cardiology.
I've always felt that patients ought to choose
their physicians first and foremost.
Find someone who you're able to relate to,
someone who you can trust, who can give you
the answers that you're looking for, and if you can
find that physician within an organization
that is of high quality, all the better.
Coordinated Health is an organization
that values, just as the name implies,
coordination of care, continuity, and communication.
These are two values that, I think,
that are paramount within the organization,
and these are things that myself
and my colleagues have always valued as well.
I am basically a, I consider myself
a generalist cardiologist, I treat all types of disease,
cardiac disease, be it coronary artery disease,
valvular heart disease, hypertension,
abnormal heart rhythms.
If it's appropriate, we have a variety
of different testing modalities available here.
We have exercise stress testing,
we have echocardiography,
we have nuclear imaging if necessary.
And also, we have the availability to do
angiographic diagnostic procedures
that are over at Easton Hospital if necessary.
A diagnostic cardiac catheterization
is an x-ray procedure, it's invasive,
where, by threading a skinny tube
up into the heart, up to the level
of the arteries that feed the heart,
we can inject dye and we can see
precisely what the artery looks like,
when you really need to know.
When you're dealing with lifestyle issues,
the fundamentals always apply.
If you have diabetes, treat your diabetes as best you can.
If you smoke, don't smoke.
If cholesterol is an issue, we can measure that,
we can decide whether medications
would be most appropriate for you at that point.
If blood pressure is an issue, we can help you treat that.
Weight management is a big factor here,
it can go a long way to treating diabetes,
hypertension, and lipid problems as well.
Over the past 25 years, I think that
cardiology clearly has benefited from
a number of technologic innovations,
or revolutions, even, if you would call it that.
I think the key issue right now is to,
kind of, wisely decide which patients
would ideally benefit from this.
And for some people, maybe just healthy
lifestyle choices would be a better option for them.
What I really enjoy about seeing patients
is oftentimes the opportunity to sit
and discuss various treatment options.
A lot of these treatments are really not written in stone.
I love it when people come in and have questions,
things that they've heard in the media,
to talk about these things.
Not everything you read on the Internet
and you read in newspapers is always true,
and sometimes, you know, applying that particular
piece of information to a particular patient's care
requires a little bit of discussion, and I love doing that.
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