Doctors

For the third year, Emory cardiologist Laurence Sperling helped U.S. News & World Report rate the country’s top diets. Sperling joined a panel of 20 experts to evaluate 29 diets from Atkins to Zone. Fortunately for Sperling, medical director of Emory's Center for Heart Disease Prevention, he didn’t have to actually try all the diets.

It’s doing surgery as though you were immersed inside the patient. It’s as if the patient was wide open. You can be a few feet away, but you’re right on top of the pathology and you can see precisely what you’re cutting.

Breast cancer was just Yolanda Mitchell’s first bad news. A decade ago at age thirty, the part-time model and boutique owner endured a mastectomy and monstrous doses of chemotherapy and radiation.“It’s been all downhill from there,” says the surprisingly cheerful Mitchell, as she ticks off a laundry list of the procedures and diagnoses she began to face.

Need knee replacement surgery or emergency help for a heart attack? The hospital you choose can make a huge difference in whether you have complications or literally make it out alive.

Maybe James Kinsey swerved to avoid an animal. Maybe his cell phone rang. Maybe, as the investigating officer suspected, he dozed off at the wheel on Old Fountain Road, just a half mile from his home in Dacula, after a long night shift. Whatever the cause, his Chevy Aveo crossed into an oncoming lane and was struck by another car. Too tall for the Chevy’s tiny cabin, the six-foot-one Gulf War veteran smashed his head against the door frame. The seat belt saved his life.

In 1993 David V. Feliciano received a phone call in the middle of the night from a surgical resident at Grady Memorial Hospital about a patient who had been stabbed in a robbery. The resident sewed up a hole in the heart, but called Feliciano again when the liver began bleeding uncontrollably. The patient was dying.

Childhood cancer is like a journey that starts when you meet a new family, a new patient. Nobody expects children to have cancer. It’s literally unbelievable. So there’s this big element of shock and fear and grief. These truly are diseases that threaten the life of their beautiful child.

If things are not going well and you don’t know what to do next, my job is to figure out how we go about figuring out what’s wrong. Is this vasculitis? An autoimmune disease like lupus? Sometimes it’s just a drug allergy. You keep going back to the history, you keep going back to the physical [exam] until you get the clue that leads you to the right diagnosis.

The patient lost both legs and her left hand when she was a year old due to Kawasaki disease, a rare childhood condition of inflamed blood vessels. She emailed Cendales soon after her twenty-first birthday, and a short time later, she was evaluated and approved as a transplant candidate.

f you were vaccinated against the flu this past winter, you had a 61 percent chance of emerging from the season without getting the bug. That’s according to the CDC, which—along with researchers at Georgia State, Emory, and Georgia Tech—is working to improve the odds even more.