Dr Jason Kaplan – Integrative and Preventative Cardiology



Integrative cardiologist and physician, Dr Jason Kaplan joins me to discuss prevention for heart disease, a holistic approach to patient care and sports cardiology. Dr Kaplan combines principles of cardiovascular, nutritional, functional and mind-body medicine in his approach to health. He also shares some surprising insights into the cardio health of elite athletes and discusses the importance of exercise for our health.

Selected Links from the Episode

Dr Jason Kaplan website
Coronary Calcium Scan
Blackmores Sydney Running Festival
TMAO study from the New England Journal of Medicine
Unstress episode with Dr Ross Walker on heart health

Download the PDF transcription
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to “Unstress”. I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Heart disease is still the number one killer and closely followed by cancer. Today we're going to get some great advice on both those and much more. My guest today is Dr. Jason Kaplan who specialises in sports cardiology, integrative and preventative cardiology.

Jason studied medicine at UNSW and graduated with honours. He went on to study internal medicine and then went on to complete additional advanced training in medical oncology and pharmacology before finally doing adult cardiology. But of course, learning never ends the more you learn the more you realise you need to learn. It's what makes health care and in fact life so interesting. But as you'll hear Jason then went on to take a more holistic integrative approach to patient care. Particularly those with multiple medical issues. I hope you enjoyed this conversation I had with Dr. Jason Kaplan.
Download the PDF transcription
Welcome to the show Jason.
Dr. Jason Kaplan: Thank you, Ron.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Jason you are a cardiologist and doctors have a very, very long journey at the best of times and specialists even longer. Can you give our listener a little bit of background as to your own journey to this point in time?

Dr. Jason Kaplan: Sure, to train in medicine it's usually five to six-year undergraduate degree in Australia though a lot more degrees are becoming post graduates and then you do what usually is two years of internship and residency and then to become a cardiologist or become a specialist position usually do around two to three years of training and adults internal medicine for various specialties.

I did that and then afterwards after my training in internal medicine, I spent some time doing medical oncology and also pharmacology before doing three years of advanced training. Three years just purely focusing on cardiology and in actual fact, the time spent in on oncology and pharmacology has put me in very good stead to be a cardiologist.

Having extra knowledge in areas of Medicine that you often don't get exposed to very often. It helps me to take care of patients in a better way and interestingly there's a very new emerging field called “cardio-oncology” which is one of the big growth areas. There's a lot of new treatment for cancer these days. These are drugs that are much better cure rates than traditional chemotherapy. They're more biologic and more targeted cancer therapies but some of them such as one we use for breast cancer called Herceptin actually has effects on the heart.

What's really interesting Ron is that more women will die from heart disease, than breast cancer in Australia and women will also develop complication from treatment for breast cancer more often will actually die from the breast cancer.

That time in oncology's meaning in very good stead, an extra experience. In pharmacology, we used all different fields of medicine and in cardiology, we use a lot of drugs to treat heart disease and it was a very helpful time spending time in that area.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Gosh you really covered the two big ones there, haven't you? I mean heart disease and cancer are the two big killers. They're vying with each other. Is heart disease still…

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