The Kinked Wire

The impact of diversity on finances makes perfect sense when you think of the workforce like a toolbox: Every tool has a purpose and design that makes it optimal for certain jobs. If your toolbox is full of only Phillip’s head screwdrivers, you’ll never be able to work with a flat head screw ... Because we currently have a racially homogeneous workforce, we have one that doesn’t employ the full se...

I try to present myself as mild-mannered, quiet and very nice, which wins a lot of battles, but deep inside there’s this fierce sense of “right.” And if there was something I needed to fight for—for the rights of patients or for members—I would go to the mat for them. —Katharine L. Krol, MD, FSIR As part of the new "Owning Success" column in SIR's IR Quarterly magazine, guest host N...

With ever-evolving technologies, cancer treatments will almost certainly become more effective and less invasive in the future. A new procedure that will likely play an important role in the future of interventional oncology is histotripsy. While the procedure could be adopted by a variety of specialties, we believe that interventional oncologists are well-positioned and best equipped to lead the...

With an increasing number of geriatric patients seeking IR services, identification of patients at higher risk for complications will allow for improved pre-procedural counseling and patient selection, as well as targeted application of resources to improve the perioperative risk profile for select patients. In the audio version of "Patient frailty and IR: The case for frailty as a geriatric...

What I wanted to do is really focus in on physicians, because I feel like we're sometimes not the ones in the forefront in making decisions in how healthcare is going ... and it's not our fault. It's because we kind of weren't taught leadership skills. —Elsie Koh, MD Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Elsie Koh, MD, about her physician leadership t...

While I do understand that there may be this idea out there, that the OBL is some magical place, the truth is that I think the ideal scenario is what I have — which is practicing on both sides of the street, so to speak. Because they each pose their own challenges and they each have their own benefits. —Bret Wiechmann, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Bret...

Dialysis, stroke, peripheral arterial disease, oncology, …these affect patients of all races. We know there are health care inequities—Black and Brown patients, and poor patients, uninsured tend to be afflicted more. We can recruit the best and the brightest students across the country and across the world to be part of the greatest specialty in all of medicine—and that’s image-guided medicine. —V...

When we show each other these extreme cases, there's a lot of cheering and high-fiving. That's a really fun part of IR, but that is not what is going to advance the field in the eyes of our referring physicians, or of the public, or of the payers, or of the government. —Daniel Y. Sze, MD, PhD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Daniel Y. Sze, MD, PhD, F...

I think we’re really at the tip of the iceberg. I think this is very early—in my mid stage of the career, I will probably not be practicing as this evolves into something that’s the full standard of care in multiple joints. But outside of BPH, this is probably the biggest and probably most impactful change I think we’ll see in the embolization space in the next 10 years. —Sandeep Bagla, MD Warren...

The CPT code may have certain required elements, and if you don’t put all of those in the report, you don’t get credit for doing the procedure. Or if the coders go ahead and code it, you could get audited later. So if someone goes to jail for fraudulent coding, you’ll be on the line as well as the coder, as the interventional radiologist—because you are ultimately responsible for what you bill. —K...

The idea that we start a little earlier in getting our students acclimated to interventional radiology is going to be so important. And it already has made a difference—I think now, students have a much clearer sense of what it is, at a much earlier stage, than maybe I did. I think it makes a big difference in terms of getting more involvement in our profession. —Derek  L. West, MD, MS Warren Krac...

I guess my take-home point is that by no means is staffing for a stroke program a small undertaking, so it really is important to have the support from the hospital as well as other medical specialties when developing the interventional stroke program ... which we’re very fortunate we have. —Eric  A. Wang, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Eric A. Wang, MD,...

At the very beginning of the pandemic, there was a big outpouring of support through social media outlets and other avenues online between training programs throughout the country. So it was kind of almost a national level of collaboration for continuing access to training in a way.  It will be good to see how we continue to use it in the coming year.    —Jason Fisher, MD In a special year-end rev...

If you follow good practices—you minimize the patient dose, you wear your protective clothing, you use the pull-down shields and you put the pull-down shields as close to the patient as you can—your exposures are going to be very low.  —Joseph Ring, DO In recognition of Nov. 8, the International Day of Radiology , Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with radiation safety officer Joseph Ring, DO, abou...

In our specialty, the stereotypes are ... you have to be a certain height. So I hear from women trainees and aspiring interventionalists that, "You know, you're too small ... You can't reach things." It's not true! —Barbara Nickel Hamilton, MD Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Barbara Nickel Hamilton, MD, about gender disparities in IR, the r...

You see that it's appalling. What can you do, and what can we do as privileged human beings, to denounce this? To say that it's wrong? To not stand for it? To say, "You know what? That's not right and this is what I'm going to do about it." —Paul J. "P.J." Rochon, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Paul J. "P.J.&qu...

" One of the big organizations that are groups of people/stakeholders that really change things, in terms of education for sure, are medical students, themselves .” —Jeanne M. Laberge, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Jeanne M. Laberge, MD, FSIR, about her role in the development of the IR Residency, the power of IRs-in-training to impact their future,...

I wanted to practice clinically oriented IR. I thought, “If I go to a group and say that we should practice IR, then my group is going to say yes—you should go for it!” And as many people know, that’s not the way the world works.” —Raj Pyne, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with interventional radiologist Raj Pyne, MD, FSIR, about the development of IR services in his Rochester, New York,...

The media portrayed scenes of just terror, frankly, particularly at Elmhurst Hospital. You see these lines of people that are waiting outside with so much anxiety and you know where that place is, you’ve driven past, you’ve seen with your own eyes that this is in your backyard. Then it starts hitting very close to home. —Akhilesh K. Sista, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with Akhilesh K....

You don’t just put a filter in and forget about it—but that’s what used to happen. And when you put a filter in, it’s like anything else. We are clinical physicians in IR and vascular surgery, and when we put these filters in your patient, you need to follow them. That means clinical follow-up, and it may mean imaging follow-up. —Matthew S. Johnson, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with i...

We may not have had everything we wanted, but we had most of the things we needed. And most of the things we needed were our own ingenuity, our own innovativeness, that comes from practicing our own specialty, interventional radiology.  —Janice Newsome, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with Janice Newsome, MD, FSIR, an interventional radiologist in Atlanta, about the COVID-19 impact on he...

It’s kind of been a roller coaster ride. We’re all excited about everything that was gong to happen with the annual meeting … And then at the beginning of the year we started to get reports and that’s when we started saying, “What are we going to do? How is this going to happen?” —Constantino S. Peña, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with Constantino S. Peña, MD, FSIR, chair of the Societ...

I am originally from a third-world country. When I moved to the United States, I couldn’t believe all the resources that were being wasted in America. And I feel that, for the first time in America, we are learning that. We are learning that we have to be cautious about wasting resources. — George Behrens, MD Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with George Behrens, MD, an interventional radiologist i...

One thing I was recognizing very quickly was that, at that time, there was very little guidance from the CDC. A lot of the information was coming from publications from the Chinese experience and the changes that needed to be put in place were really things that hadn’t been done before. — Rajesh Shah, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with Rajesh Shah, MD, FSIR, an interventional radiologi...

There was a report that several people had been sick, and several were transported to hospitals. The next thing we heard was that all of the ambulance crews and firemen who had been involved in the transfer were in quarantine … and it really seemed kind of crazy. — R. Torrance Andrews, MD, FSIR Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with R. Torrance Andrews, MD, FSIR, a Seattle-based interventional radi...