Since you are a Canuck (like my wife Magdalena) Atul Verma at Southlake is very good Lorraine. I’ve sent a number of people to Dr Verma who did well and Dr Verma did train with Dr Natale long ago back in the Cleveland Clinic early glory days for AFIB ablation under Natale’s vision and guidance back then up though late 2007.
What ever you do though Lorraine, please Do NOT make an AFIB ablation decision based primarily, or even significantly, on ‘convenience’. Sometimes that approach may work out okay, but in my long experience working closely helping to usher so many people through their expert ablation process, I’ve seen many regrets from those who rolled the dice based on “the best EP ablation doc
close to me”. This is your one heart, so be highly discriminating in choosing the very best and most experienced ablation expert you can possibly arrange for yourself if that requires 5 or so total days of travel!
Dr Natale is, without a doubt, my hands down number one choice in the world for AFIB/AFlutter ablation! He has objectively performed the most AFIB/Flutter ABLs on the planet at well over 11,000 and counting total and, as I’ve noted before, it is even more telling and important that over 75% of Natale’s annual caseload is comprised of LSPAF and persistent cases!
This fact is simply a phenomenally impressive and meaningful acheivement that literally separates even most other top tier EPs from Dr Natale’s unique career path, and no one else on the planet comes anywhere close to having so much individual experience with such a huge volume of cases often referred to Dr Natakr by other truly top ablation docs when they give up and punt their most difficult patients to Natale to fix when they may have taken three of four cracks at a given tough nut to crack and have not had real success yet.
It is extremely hard to attract that large of a percentage of the most challenging cases largely because it does require having become a defacto elite maestro in the eyes of so many other very experienced ablation EPs who will turn to you to help solve their biggest challenges. This presents a real catch-22 when it comes to anyone else ever catching up to Andrea anytime soon, even up through when he finally hangs up his catheters which, at nearly 58yrs old in two months, he likely won’t do for a good long while yet, and not with the passion and dedication Natale has for this field.
As a comparison, the director of the large UCSF ablation center serving the greater Bay Area with roughly 8,000,000 people said their average LSPAF patient Ablation case load average represent about 5 % of their total ablation case load!
Again, one would have to essentially mimic Natale’s entirely unprecedented EP ablation career to approach such a huge percentage of the most challenging cases and unless you perform very large numbers of such difficult and challenging cases yourself, which very few do, it’s extremely difficult to excel in every degree of difficulty of AFIB/AFlutter progression without having a similar large percentage of such patient’s to learn from over many years.
Those lessor numbers of ablation EPs who even offer persistent AF ablations, typically only do relatively modest numbers of persistent ABLs each year as it is, and yet for persistent and LSPAF patients, you truly should hold out for the most highly experienced persistent/LSPAF expert with the highest perscentage of cases just like your case and a renowned track record for consistent success as well, that are acheived every single day in their EP-Labs, to entrust your hearts care to their hands.
That is the safest bet in how I can do the very best for our Afibbers, bar none, as if each and every one were part of my family (not to mention my own over a decade of total freedom now from a 16 year bout of what eventually become an aggressive case of persistent AFI
. I’ve simply found, in reality, that starting ones search ... and finishing it ... with the most experienced world-renowned operator grants the greatest odds of achieving durable freedom from even the most challenging cases of all Atrial Arrhythmias with typically the least amount of total work required... which is the key thing by far in my book!
Of course, there are other excellent ablation EPs available such as Drs. Rodney Horton, Luigi DiBiase, Pasquale Santangeli, Fermin Garcia, Amin Al-Ahmad just to name a few, and a good number of which were mentored by Dr Natale. And I readily recommend those patients who simply can’t make it to Dr. Natale, for whatever reason, to one of these relatively select highly skilled EPs, such as Dr Verma in Canada, Profs Jais & Haissaguerre in France and Claudio Tondo/Antonio Della-Russo in Milan Italy, etc., and others.
However, I almost always recommend Dr Natale as your first best choice from my many years now of seeing first hand how reliably those Afibbers I send to him are filled with gratitude many years later at what Dr Natale has done for them in: “giving me my life back” as the most ubiquitous comment I’ve heard over and over and over again so many times over these many years! It’s very hard to argue with that kind of success.
So long as Dr Natale remaims active at the peak of his prowess and the field, I suspect he will remain the go to guy, doubly so for the most challenging cases.
Also, in my book, Afibbers especially with persistent and LSPAF should not compromise one iota more than one absolutely has to in choosing your expert ablation EP. The more advanced your AFIB/Flutter, ever the more discriminating you should be in making this single most important choice that will have, by far, the biggest impact on your future AFIB history going forward!
Cheers and Happy Holidays!
Shannon
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/12/2018 10:36AM by Shannon.