Punjab Cardiac Surgeon chosen to deliver talk at prestigious National Conference

Ludhiana, February 3, 2017: The state of Punjab was bestowed an honour when one of its doctors – Dr Harinder Singh Bedi – was specially invited to deliver a talk at the APICON 2017 – the largest conference of Physicians of India . Dr Bedi is the Chairman of Cardiac Sciences at the Ludhiana Mediways hospital in Ludhiana and is one of the senior most practising cardio-vascular surgeons of India. He is the only cardiac surgeon from Punjab to have been invited to deliver the talk .
Dr Bedi is a pioneer in Cardio Vascular Surgery having worked previously at the St Vincents Hospital and the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Sydney Australia and the Escorts Heart Institute Delhi . He is credited with special mention in the Limca Book of World Records thrice . He is an innovator of some special techniques which have made heart and vascular surgery safer - specifically in beating heart surgery and arterial bypass surgery . He is a member of the prestigious Society of Thoracic Surgeons USA and the New York Academy of Sciences .
Dr Bedi spoke on Pulmonary Embolism and its treatment . According to Dr Bedi, pulmonary embolism (PE) is a potentially fatal disease which is very often missed . Pulmonary embolism has a very rapid and deadly progress unless detected and treated in time. In this disease a large blood clot gets stuck in the lung vessels leading to lack of oxygen and damage to the heart. It is estimated that over a lakh people die due to PE each year – this is the equivalent of the disappearance of a city the size of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Dr Bedi told that the obese and elderly are at greater risk of PE after any major surgery , while women who take birth-control pills are 10 times more likely to develop blood clots . Long distance flights are another risk factor . Those taking multiple flights over a short period of time are also at a higher risk. This is because the risk of PE does not go away completely after a flight is over, and the risk remains elevated for about four weeks. It is interesting to note that the famous tennis player – Serena Williams - suffered from the same condition some time back . Even the research of World Health Organisation on PE shows that the risk doubles after travel lasting for over two hours. The study of the WHO Research Into Global Hazards of Travel (WRIGHT) project, which was conducted by scientists from Britain, Switzerland and Netherlands, said the risk of developing blood clots and PE during any form of travel longer than four hours was one case for every 15 fully-booked jumbo jets.
The treatment is a judicious combination of medicine and intervention in the form of a special method of dissolving the clot using catheters to reach the clot to deliver the medicine directly, or a major surgery to remove the clot . Both are successful if performed in time .
Dr Bedi was invited as he has a fairly large experience of treating this disease which requires the highest level of infrastructure and trained personnel to be tackled successfully. Time is of the essence and a 24 hour available team is important if such cases are to be salvaged . The audience included a large number of physicians from all over India and some from abroad . A lively interaction followed the talk.