The Corporate America Years 1970 - 2003 Medical Sales &Marketing 1972 - 2003
While I spent the first 3 years after leaving the Marine Corps in Consumer Product Sales, the exciting part of my career began in 1972, when I began employment in sales and marketing for a medical manufacturer who specialized in Cardiovascular Medicine.
It was a relatively new field then. Dr. Michael DeBakey had done the first heart bypass in 1969 and working out of Denver, I was assigned to sell diagnostic and therapeudic cardiovascular products to C.V. Surgeons, Cardiologists, and Radiologists in Hospitals in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas.
Because the field was so new then, I was able to be trained by a select group of Pioneer C.V. Surgeons, Cardiologists, and Radiologists, in the world. The times were so exciting then, that in a brief time in the industry I decided to learn all I could about the field and procedures I sold products to and for. I had found my home and the medical professionals I worked with daily were all dedicated to their chosen careers. We were all literally growing up together in an industry that required total dedication.
In 1978, I heard about a Radiologist in Zurich, Switzerland. Andreas Gruentzig had invented a technique that, rather than bypass occluded coronary arteries, he would manipulate a balloon through the coronary and into the lesion, and inflate a balloon and compress the lesion to the wall.
At the time, I thought it sounded like science fiction at the time, but eventually I met Gruentzig and became totally emersed in his insight and product development. My company came to an agreement with him for the rights to sale and later manufacturer his balloon products and introduce and sell his products in the United States.
In the early 80's, almost without warning, the FDA approved his products for sale and use in the United States. It was a total and unexpected surprise, because there were no training centers existing for the cardiologists to learn to do the procedure, which was now known as Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty or what became known as PTCA.
Interventional Cardiology had come to the United States!
And because there were no training facilities available, a small group of sales representatives, including me, were summoned to the University Of Massachusetts Medical Center Cath Lab, where we received intensive training on the procedure and actually got to do an angioplasty on pigs.
That's me in the picture in the upper right of this segment of the webpage, and I'm doing one of the first angioplasties ever done in America. Other sales representatives that day, also did one of the first angioplasties in the United States. The poor pig succumbed to the procedures, but we were armed with as much information as was available at the time, and a week after our training, we were in the field training Cardiologists and the nurses and technicians in their cath labs across America.
Another year would pass and Dr. Gruentzig moved from Zurich to Atlanta's EmoryUniversity and including Emory, 4 training centers were set up in America. But the technology was constantly evolviing and that kept the sales reps (turned trainers) busy traveling, participating in the procedures, and training and updating staffs for many years to come.
Those were my glory years, because everyday, was a new adventure, and at the end of the day, I knew that I had accomplished something worthwhile with my life and the medical community.
