If you or someone you love has suffered a heart attack, you’re all too aware that surviving the coronary event is just the first of many challenges that lie ahead. In the coming months, you’ll chart new territory, learning new lifestyle habits and ditching not-so-healthy ones that you’ve picked up along the way.
The whole process would be less scary and perhaps more rewarding if there was a way to stack the deck and somehow make it less likely that you’ll have another coronary event in the near future. Think cardiac rehabilitation, says the team at Cardio Metabolic Institute.
In this blog, we explain what cardiac rehabilitation is and how choosing it can help you live a full and productive life after your coronary event.
Cardiac rehabilitation is a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary medically supervised wellness program for patients who’ve suffered from a coronary event like chronic stable angina or a heart attack.
Cardiac rehabilitation is also a great fit for patients who’ve undergone coronary surgery like artery bypass, angioplasty, stenting, a heart or heart-lung transplant, or heart valve repair or replacement procedures. Cardiac rehabilitation programs are typically consist of three main areas of concentration: nutrition, exercise and physical fitness, and counseling for stress reduction.
In many ways, cardiac rehabilitation is a tangible way for patients who’ve suffered a coronary event to regain control of their life in a time when everything may seem so completely out of their control.
Once you get past the fact that you survived your coronary event, you’re faced with trying to understand what happened from a medical perspective, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent it from happening again. The medical terminology alone can be overwhelming during this ultra-stressful time.
While there’s nothing you can do about the event that got you here, cardiac rehabilitation can put you back in the driver’s seat when it comes to lowering your risk of issues in the future.
Remarkably, clinical research shows that patients who undergo cardiac rehabilitation have a reduced mortality rate to the tune of more than 50% compared with patients who don’t choose cardiac rehabilitation. Similarly, studies report that cardiac rehabilitation patients see a 25% reduction in hospital readmissions.
As if its record for preventing future coronary issues and hospital readmissions isn’t enough, cardiac rehabilitation has several additional benefits.
Patients who choose cardiac rehabilitation can expect a highly customized wellness program not only designed for recovery and healing, but also completely dialed into their particular situation. While no two heart attacks are identical, the same can be said for patients who suffer a coronary event.
For this reason, the map to recovery should be matched to each patient’s uniqueness.
Patients handle stress differently and have different lifestyle parameters that need to be considered, such as how much physical activity they get and their fitness levels as well as their diet. The medical team that creates your cardiac rehabilitation program considers all of these factors when they create your personalized wellness program.
It’s true that there are no easy fixes when it comes to heart disease. Rethinking your old ways of living and creating new healthier habits is definitely challenging. But heart disease didn’t happen overnight, and neither will your recovery. The good news is that you don’t have to go it alone.
Sure, your family and friends are there for you, but when you choose cardiac rehabilitation, you interact with a multidisciplinary team of medical professionals to advise you, track your progress, hold you accountable, and support you and your family every step of the way.
Cardio Metabolic Institute is a Pritikin Certified Intensive Cardiac Rehab™ center, a proven heart health wellness program. Our medical team and providers are specially trained to implement the Pritikin Program and the Pritikin Eating Plan to address the common contributing coronary event factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, poor diets and being overweight.
Our team uses diagnostic tests like blood tests and stress tests and conducts ECG-monitored fitness sessions to track the progress of your heart health so you can course-correct to a new healthier lifestyle that slows, stabilizes, and in some cases can even reverse the progression of your heart condition.
If you suffered a coronary event and want to learn more about cardiac rehabilitation, contact our interventional cardiologists Dr. Parthiv Amin or Dr. Dinesh Singal at our Somerset, New Jersey, location. You can book your consultation by clicking the “Book online” button or by calling today.
