The road you travel after experiencing a heart related incident is a hard one. Heart attacks, heart failure, angioplasty and heart surgery all take a toll on your body. Without cardiac rehab, you could be setting yourself for another disaster. It is time to make some changes.

What is Cardiac Rehab?

Cardiac rehab is a medical program with the sole purpose of improving your cardiovascular health after you’ve experienced a heart related incident. After all, one’s poor cardiovascular health is likely to be the reason a heart related incident was triggered, whether by a poor lifestyle or related to a disease. Cardiac rehab focuses on three separate components: exercise, education and counseling.

The Three Cornerstones of Cardiac Rehab

Through exercise, a qualified individual will work with you in finding a cardio workout regiment that will work for you. The regiment will consider the reason for the poor cardiovascular health and work around that. For example, if one has some form of heart disease, of course, the patient wouldn’t be pushed into running a marathon.

By educating patients, the individual will learn and adhere to a lifestyle that improves their cardiovascular health, rather than hinder it and cause another episode. Is the patient a smoker? Then it is time for them to consider quitting. Does the patient have a poor diet? Then it is time for them to consider improving that diet.

Last, but not least, is counseling patients. It is no secret that stress makes everything worse. It is akin to a wheel spinning in the mud; it gets no one nowhere and everyone is worse off because of it. Like any kind of counseling, patients are taught ways of handling their stress so their heart can be as happy as possible.

How Can Heart Disease Be Diagnosed?

One of the better tools used to diagnose heart disease goes to cardiac catheterization. With the use of a catheter and a chosen blood vessel, the catheter makes its way to your heart. From there, qualified individuals can keep track of the pressure, as well as blood flow and, if need be, measure both. For blockages, doctors actually use dye to track the flow of your blood, which can be seen with the use of a medical scan, specifically X-rays.

One More Individual Helped

It is thanks to cardiac rehab that a recovered American citizen does not become another number in the 610,000 that die from heart disease every single year. It can be especially helpful to women, considering heart disease in the United States targets women the most, placing itself as the number one cause of death.

Even if you are young and full of life, it is never a bad idea to speak with a cardiologist at a cardiovascular center about heart disease and the signs, especially if you family has a history of it.