Opening Thoughts From Your New Editor

BY GEORGE ANDROS, M.D.

Everyone should be as fortunate as I was in having a great mentor during residency. Mine was Robert Ritchie Linton.

When I began my final year, I considered a career in academic endocrine surgery because it corresponded with my research interests. Dr. Linton listened patiently as I outlined my interests, goals, and aspirations. When I finished, he asked me if I had seriously considered vascular surgery.

"Yes sir, I have," I replied, not merely to be polite, and added, "but wouldn't that mean that I would need to give up general surgery?"

Dr. Linton responded that, yes, I probably would have to limit myself to vascular surgery "if I wanted to do it right." Many of us heard his famous admonition and carry it with us still: "You got to do it right, ma' boy!"

But Dr. Linton didn't stop there. "What other specialty is there, George, in which you can care for the young and old, and men and women alike?

You can operate on veins and arteries, and even the portal system. Your procedures can be small and refined like carotids and distal bypass, or large like aneurysm repair.

"And we don't have interference from cardiologists like the heart surgeons do; we do the vascular medicine and diagnosis as well.

We even do our own angiograms! No question, ma' boy, it is the most interesting area of work in all of medicine!"

And so I heeded his advice and went into vascular surgery. More important, I took his attitude to heart.

Vascular surgery was a BIG specialty and you needed to confine yourself to it if you were ever going to be any good. But that didn't mean that my horizons were limited.

My partners and I stuck with angiography, and when catheter-based interventions came along, it was but a short step to incorporate them into our practice.

The same went for the vascular laboratory. Linton had only an oscillometer, but it wasn't long before the vascular laboratory was stocked with new devices capable of both screening and accurate diagnosis. It was my first inkling that our specialty would soon become a high-tech playground.

Today, vascular surgery differs vastly from the field to which Dr. Linton welcomed me many years ago.

Yes, it has become technologically advanced and minimally invasive. But it also should remain maximally patient centered.

Vascular surgeons have the skills of interventional radiologists, yet we are more than interventionists: We are vascular specialists.

The scope of our specialty is broader than ever before. It is this vision of vascular surgery--patient care that is both high tech and "high touch"--that VASCULAR SPECIALIST has presented so successfully and will continue to promote.