Meet Russ

The “Team” Physician 

My friends joke that I am their team physician keeping everyone healthy for the Saturday morning weekend warrior mountain bike rides.  I remind them that I am a just a heart surgeon and my colleagues Eric Heiden and Max Testa are the “real” team physicians. Those guys are out on the road regularly with the BMC Cycling team dragging behind the peloton in a SAG wagon or treating an injured athlete under the team tent. 

As a cardiothoracic surgeon, my career didn’t leave me much time for summer layovers in Europe during the Tour de France.  However, for over 15 years now I have been skiing, hiking, and biking regularly with my buddies in Park City. I use the term buddies loosely because if you’ve ever been to Park City, you’d know that the average “buddy” is someone who runs ultra-marathons, competes in IronMan competitions, has climbed Mount Everest (more than once), competed in the Olympics, or even won multiple gold medals like Eric Heiden (actually, no one is like Eric Heiden). You get the picture. 

Over the years, these aging guys and gals have become my unofficial sports team. They call me all the time for whatever it is they should be calling their regular doctor for but for some reason have decided it’s me they need instead. Maybe it's because I am a sucker and give a lot away for free, but more likely, they call me because they need someone who is always there for them when they have a concern. Their issues run the gamut of life, from minor trail injuries to advice on raising kids (I have 5, so that makes me an expert). From heart palpitations to hot flashes and from problems in the boardroom to problems in the bedroom, I seem to be the go to guy for all their medical care and advice about life in general.

The point is, if you’re over 40 and active, you need a doctor who knows you and understands you. I mean really knows you and really understands you. You need a doctor who you can call without hesitation and who you know will listen to your concerns. Even if he doesn’t know the answer, you need someone who will listen to you and find the answer, or point you to someone who has it. This is the way I was trained “back in the day,” when often your doctor knew you better then your own spouse. 

After Hours

This paradigm has always been the root of my philosophy as a physician and I am pretty sure I got it from my folks. Both my mother and father were old-school pediatricians. During the day, they were in the office treating children or making rounds on newborn babies in the hospital nursery. However, outside their normal work hours, they were everyone's 24x7 family doctors.

My mother spent much of her time outside the hospital and office counseling adolescents and adults alike for all kinds of problems she never thought she would be addressing when she was training to become a pediatrician. Amazingly, she would perform all this after-hour care for free.  

I remember, she would say to us when there was an evening knock at the office door, “These people have nothing and nowhere else to go. I have to help them.” She kept this routine well into her 80’s and that is how we know she loved being a physician.

Nor’easters and House Calls

We had some really big snowstorms while growing up back in Philly, Nor’easters we called them. I can recall several times in the middle of a blizzarding snowstorm a distressed mother would call my father about her sick child and we would hear him on the phone saying, “Can you make it over to my office? Never mind, I’ll just come to your house.” Who makes house calls, let alone house calls in the middle of a blizzard? My father did, that’s who.

Treating the Real Heart

The days of the house call are long a thing of the past, however there are still a lot of docs out there that really do care about you, your family, and your friends. The problem in 2018 is that healthcare as it is practiced in the U.S. is not always compatible with putting that attitude first and foremost in an everyday practice. Your wallet, and how to empty it, seems to be the healthcare system's biggest concern, not whether you are truly happy with yourself and if you are performing at your peak level of performance in all aspects of your life. 

It's that concerning state of today’s healthcare that drove me away from being a hospital-based cardiothoracic surgeon and made me decide to just focus on helping people “upstream” before they would ever need my services in the cardiothoracic operating room. I had reached a point where I grew tired of not having the time to get to know my patients well enough to fix their “real hearts”.

Yes, as a heart surgeon, I could fix their physical heart and get them back home to their loved ones, but I couldn’t do much else with the little time I had leftover to address the real problems that brought them to me in the first place. As heart surgeons operating in a hospital setting, we do almost nothing to help people change the trajectory of their lives and eliminate bad habits and poor lifestyle choices.

Through Park City Performance Medicine I have made it my mission to go "upstream" and help as many people as possible keep very far away from open heart surgery and live longer, healthy and more wonderful lives.

Read Russ' Bio & Curriculum Vitae

Park City Performance Medicine

(435) 200-3452