GUARDING THE YARD: Terriers return offensive bite to lineup
August 21, 2007August 23
August 23, 2007
The world-renowned Cardiovascular Institute of the South celebrates its 24th anniversary this month.
The actual anniversary was on August 15, the birthday of CIS founder, president and media director Dr. Craig Walker’s daughter, Ashley.
The Bourg-born Walker actually founded the institute on Ashley’s first birthday.
As a cardiologist, he trained at a Harvard hospital in Boston. But he said he always intended to return to the area where he grew up and contribute to it through medicine.
He watched a lot of people suffer and die from cardiovascular problems while growing up.
“It wasn’t just one or two. It was teachers. It was family. It was many different people that had a profound influence that I watched die of ravages of heart disease, or for that matter, peripheral vascular disease,” said Walker. “Stroke, which is carotid disease. My grandmother, when I was growing up, had a stroke really before I was born and was eternally confined to a wheel chair. I saw many others have heart disease, stroke, amputation and all of those things had a great influence on me.”
But the situation has changed quite dramatically over the last 24 years, according to Medicare data.
“At that time, we had one of the highest death rates in the entire United States from cardiovascular disease. Since then, we have lowered that to one of the lowest throughout the entire United States,” said Walker. “We’ve completely flip flopped that. We think in large measure e are directly responsible for that change.”
He credited the “flip-flop” to a combined effort of spreading awareness about cardiovascular disease, improving the level of care, providing better diagnosis and treatments and pushing prevention.
Walker also credited one other reason.
“And in a large measure, it’s because we’ve developed really the most prominent cardiovascular practice probably right now in the entire world with doctors coming from all over,” he said.
Walker said he thought his institute would have an impact when it was founded 24 years ago, but he never dreamed it would become a big as it has with 11 clinics spread out across southern Louisiana, 40 physicians, 500 employees, patients from every state and 40 or more foreign countries.
“Never dreamed of that,” said Walker. “But certainly, I did dream we would create a practice in the Houma area that if our families were sick, we would be very happy that they would receive their care there, that they would get care that would equal any place in the world.”
He said the growth of his institute started to become really obvious in 1998.
His institute was the only group in the state that had stints, as well as many other current technologies, and was receiving patients from all over the country about that time.
“This really was a grass root, building things really from the ground floor up, kind of effort,” said Walker.
The institute has been involved in developing many of the technologies and procedures currently being employed to treat cardiovascular problems, like the use of lasers to dissolute blood clots and the popliteal artery stick technique.
CIS in Houma practices at Terrebonne General Medical Center and its other practices work with regional hospitals, but Walker said there have been a lot of requests to not only develop practices out of state but also out of the country.
Walker indicated he’s not interested right now in expanding CIS outside the state or even south Louisiana.
“We really wanted to focus ourselves on our area. We’re in the Cajun Belt. We’re happy to be in the Cajun Belt. And really it’s our goal to stay focused in that area as best as we can,” said Walker.
