Rehabilitation
Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation
Twelve weeks of monitored exercise after a cardiac event or a lung diagnosis, three mornings a week, ten minutes from home.
After a heart attack, bypass surgery, a stent, or a new diagnosis of heart failure or COPD, supervised rehabilitation is among the most effective things available. It lowers the chance of a second event and of ending up back in a hospital bed.
It is also one of the most skipped treatments in medicine, and the reason is almost entirely geography. Three sessions a week for twelve weeks is thirty six trips. When each trip is two hours of driving, people start well and quit by the fourth week. When it is ten minutes, they finish.
Sessions run Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. You exercise with your heart rhythm monitored, supervised by staff who are trained and equipped to act if something goes wrong, which is the part that makes it safe to push at all.
Alongside the exercise there is straightforward education: what each of your medications is for, how to read your own symptoms, and what to change about how you eat without being handed a diet nobody could follow.
Medicare and most insurers cover cardiac rehabilitation after a qualifying event, and pulmonary rehabilitation for moderate to severe COPD. Ask your provider for the referral, or call us and we will chase it down.