What are some surgical procedures for forms of heart disease?

Ablation

Dr. John A. Schnorr: From an arrhythmia standpoint, if you have an arrhythmia, and not just the skipped beats, the premature beats, but if you truly have a atrial fibrillation which is an irregular heartbeat coming from the top chambers of the heart, or atrial tachycardia or as a variety of very fast, arrhythmias that can give you much discomfort or even cause you to pass out. Those can be fixed through catheter type procedures, where we go up into the heart with an electrode and can actually isolate the source of the arrhythmia. And burn it, it's called an Ablation, where we actually use radio frequency waves and literally burn that pathway to end the cause of the arrhythmia.

So that's done very commonly, and it's a very common cure for your arrhythmia.

Pacemaker

Dr. John A. Schnorr: There are other types of therapies that can be done to help treat heart, or other types of heart disease such as congestive heart failure. There are types of congestive heart failure where your heart is beating out of sync. The 2 bottom chambers beat out of sync, and you can actually place a pacemaker now on both sides of the heart, they pace the heart at the same time to give you more of an effect of heartbeat with each beat. Instead of an out of sync heartbeat, you get a strong concise, synchronized heartbeat of both of your lower chambers.

And that's also done, it's an overnight procedure, you just come in one day, go home the next morning, very minimal incision to plant the pacemaker that people will be very well with that.

Defibrillator

Dr. John A. Schnorr: And those patients with congestive heart failure or some types of more malignant or concerning arrhythmias, there's another type of pacemaker type there before that called a defibrillator, which is a device, sort of like a pacemaker, put in the same way a pacemaker is, but it can actually detect if you have a bad rhythm or you developing a, what could be a fatal arrhythmia, and it can either pace you or alternatively shock you out of it.

So it's like having jumper cables already hooked up to your heart, in case your heart or the battery were to die.