FM JANUARY 2019 - digital edition

slug
Creation of awareness about IR
becomes the top priority among
the practitioners of this emerging
subspecialty. “We want the radiologist
to take up interventional radiology
and spread the message that IR can
really be helpful in a lot of places that
people are not aware of,” says Dr Lijesh
Kumar. The need to create awareness
is especially greater in changing
disease scenarios. There has been an
exponential rise in liver diseases owing
to lifestyle changes.
Towards longitudinal care
Further, there is a need for a proper
referral system like multi-disciplinary
board meetings in hospitals. Experts
from various specialties should sit
together to decide what is the best
treatment course to be followed for a
patient, says Dr Amar Mukund. Multidisciplinary
decision making, which
is common in oncological settings, is
the need of the hour, because all the
specialists may not always know what is
happening in other fields. ”So, if we sit
together, we’ll be able to narrow down
on the best tailor-made approach to the
patient. Probably in difficult situations,
we may give options that surgical
therapy is better in a certain case, or we
What surgery,
laparoscopy and
endoscopy cannot
do, can be done by
interventional
radiology. The
problem we face
with IR is the lack of
big infrastructure
and more trained
personnel.
Dr T S Chandrashekar
Gastroenterologist and
Founder Chairman
Medindia Hospitals
Chennai
may feel that neither surgical nor IR is
needed, only medicinal therapy will do,”
he explains.
Indications are that things are
gradually moving toward that direction,
believe many IR experts. “There’s a
slow shift towards a group interactive
approach,” argues Dr Mukunthan, “and
we [radiologists] need to become
clinical radiologists rather than [imaging]
radiologists.”
As a safe, quick, cost-effective and
less invasive solution in many clinical
conditions, IR holds much promise for
the future. As awareness grows, IR
technology should be accepted as a part
of the clinical management workflow.
Furthermore, IRs are globally
becoming more clinical, providing a
longitudinal care model by seeing
patients in the clinic before and after
procedures to ensure that proper
treatment has occurred. This model
will provide more momentum to the
subspecialty to emerge as a leader in
the future.
IR clinicians feel that the technology
will grow faster in the future, and that its
presence should have more impact in the
practice of medicine going forward.
—With inputs from Divya Choyikutty, Kochi
54 / FUTURE MEDICINE / JANUARY 2019