A group of health-conscience community members took advantage of a free medical consult recently, courtesy of Cleveland’s Dr. Foluso Fakorede.
The interventional cardiologist with Cardiovascular Solutions of Central Mississippi, shared from the wealth of his knowledge with those who had questions about their heart health.
During the free session sponsored by Felicia Lampkin and held at Body Works and Tan, Fakorede challenged the group to practice moderation and take ownership of their health.
He inquired what they thought were the top five most prevalent medical conditions in the U.S. And their responses yielded, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and a few others, but he asserted that the number one condition was venous insufficiency, which he described as the improper functioning of the vein valves in the leg.
He explained how blood flows from the heart to the rest of the body and that the calf muscle squeezes and pushes blood back up to a person’s heart for that purpose. He advocates building strong calf muscles to increase blood flow because weak muscles create circulation issues.
It’s his conviction that 40 million people suffer from venous insufficiency but only about 1.5 million even know they have it.
Second on his list of prevalent conditions was diabetes and his statements included the startling statistic that 50 percent of Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. “Sugar is the new tobacco,” he said.
That is followed by peripheral arterial disease, noting that it affects 18 million people and that 60 percent of the people that have poor circulation don’t know they have it. He said he has a passion for treating people with poor circulation because the amputation rates are too high in Mississippi and the southeast, compared to other regions of the country.
Heart disease made number four on his list and he emphasized that age, stress and race were key factors, asserting that the risk for African Americans is three times higher than for whites. Unfortunately, according to Fakorede, blacks make up less than five percent of all related studies and most of the studies are based on white men over the age of 60.
Rounding out his list was stroke and although these are not the only ones, according to him they are the top five. Afterwards there was a period for questions where he disclosed other statistics such as, one in three women die of heart attacks and women are more likely to die from their first heart event than men and excessive fatigue can be a sign of circulation issues.
In addition, smoking cessation adds about eight years to your life and even though people consider aspirin as a blood thinner, Fakorede said technically it isn’t, but it is good to take one every day, if you can, because it inhibits fat platelets and calcium build up.
Fakorede completed fellowships in cardiology, interventional cardiology, and endovascular intervention at Cooper University in Camden, New Jersey and was named chief cardiology fellow. Afterwards he joined a private practice group in Tennessee.
Fakorede is Nigerian born but immigrated to New Jersey as a teenager. While in school there, he obtained a bachelor of arts in biology and a minor in economics from Rutgers University and his medical degree from UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Camden, before completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital at Weill Cornell University.
He started Cardiovascular Solutions of Central Mississippi in Cleveland in 2015. Lampkin said she just wanted as many people as possible to take advantage of this beneficial health information fee free.
Prior to coming to Cleveland, Fakorede was working in Jackson, TN but was unhappyand wanted to work somewhere he could make a difference, he wanted a cause, “Something I call legacy building,” he said. He praises his mother who was a registered nurse that worked two jobs, one in a gas station, just so her children wouldn’t have to suffer as she had.
