M e d i c a l R e c o r d F e at u r e
WELCOME NEW MEMBER
VARUNA SUNDARAM, M.D.
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he Berks County Medical Society is pleased to welcome Dr. Varuna Sundaram, Assistant Professor of Vascular Surgery at Penn State Hershey and on staff at Penn State Health St. Joseph Medical Center. Dr. Sundaram earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ before attending Saint George’s University School of Medicine. She trained in Categorical General Surgery at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, NJ from 2007-2012, and went on to complete a fellowship in Vascular Surgery at the University of Buffalo in Buffalo, NY from 20122014. She is Board Certified in both General Surgery and Vascular Surgery. This year she gave a presentation on minimally invasive and hybrid techniques to aneurysm repair at the Berks Cardiovascular Symposium. We are fortunate to have Dr. Sundaram’s expertise available to the Berks County community, and very happy she has chosen to support her profession with her medical society membership. To get to know Dr. Sundaram a little better, we asked her to answer a few questions: Describe the focus of your practice and any areas of special interest/expertise. Vascular surgery including open and minimally invasive endovascular techniques for limb salvage, peripheral arterial disease, carotid disease, hemodialysis access, venous disease and aneurysm disease, with a focus on purely percutaneous endovascular thoracic and aortic aneurysm repair and fenestrated and branched aortic aneurysm device grafts. Why did you decide to practice medicine in Berks County? I was hired by Penn State Hershey to be full time academic faculty but mainly based out of the Penn State Health-St. Joseph’s campus. It’s a wonderful community with great diversity. It allows me a wonderful opportunity to provide a much needed service to the community, and it’s close to my home state of New Jersey.
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www.berkscms.org
What do you like best about practicing medicine? It’s a profession in which I can use my skills to make a difference for the people around me in my community. Particularly in vascular surgery, I feel we can see the benefit almost immediately after any intervention. This benefit for our patients can be seen across a wide spectrum whether it is for limb salvage or the ability to walk further without pain or preventing instant death from a possible ruptured aneurysm or from cosmetically unpleasing varicose veins. If you could change one thing about the current practice environment, what would it be? The restraints placed on medical providers by insurance companies. Being relatively new to the field, I have quickly learned how insurance companies can really limit our abilities as physicians to provide a service to our patients. With too much focus on costs and profits, too many patients fall through the gaps and don’t receive the adequate treatment and medications they need. Are you involved in any nonprofit/community groups at this time? I have been involved in medical mission trips to Haiti in the past and am excited at the prospect of doing more mission trips in the future. Please tell us a little about your family and the activities you enjoy outside of work. I am a New Jersey native but I thoroughly enjoy exploring Berks County and beyond in my free time. I particularly enjoy international travel when I can find the time to get away! Name one thing about your practice / field of medicine that you think all your patients should know. We, as vascular surgeons, are uniquely qualified to diagnose minimally invasively or invasively and to treat medically, surgically, or minimally invasively via endovascular techniques the gamut of vascular pathologies. Sometimes it’s equally as important to know when and when NOT to operate.