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“The most rewarding experiences along my career have been to attend some subspecialty specific meetings and witness the passion of some people for these problems. Times have changed for surgeons and for everybody in general, where, in the past to make a living wasn’t as difficult as it is now. And I guess surgeons at some point had the luxury to decide, well, this is a problem that is sexy to treat, and I would like to treat, and these other problems are not sexy. And I can tell you that for instance, varicose veins were not among the sexy topics to treat. They did not compare in excitement to a ruptured aneurysm or a stroke management or anything else. Well, it happens that now a lot of people cannot say no to work, just like anything else. And so whether people like it or not, they have to do varicose veins because that’s a source of income.
Now there’s ways and ways to do your job. And one of them is to do your job in an impassionate way and just going through the motions. And there’s another way to do your job, is to put everything you have and you are into your job. And this is what I find for instance, in the American venous forum meeting. The American venous forum is an organization that dedicates to the care of venous diseases. And that is superficial veins, the veins, clots, and problems like that. And I belong to this organization for the last 10 years. And in fact, I just came back from the meeting in California two days ago, and it is refreshing to see the passion that these people put in their daily jobs into research and into trying to coming up with ways to treat these patients in a better and better way. So the American venous forum is one institution that for my peers, I will strongly encourage to join and make the organization grow because in fact, it’s a organization that I wish would be larger.
The names are already known, the people that present are the same people out of the, and I wish I would see a little more younger people with that enthusiasm in venous disease. I happen to have a mentor by one of the world experts in veins, Dr. Nicola Robles, who works in Stony Brook, New York. And I just saw him in the meeting, of course, and he has written, I would say 70% of the knowledge in veins that there is. And so that passion is contagious and it’s something I always enjoy. So American Venous forum is one organization that helps in these problems. The second one is the American college of radiologists and there’s three or four of these organizations that actually grew people with this passion in vein disease that are working together in researching and creating new ways to treat this vein patients.”
