Pulmonary Rehabilitation
When you have some type of medical condition impacting your lungs, you logically want a team of experts who can help you breathe easier. You can access that care through the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program at West Tennessee Healthcare.
Specialized Rehabilitation for Lung Health
If you’ve experienced some type of medical condition affecting your lungs, such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis, asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, or COPD, you may find yourself struggling to recover. Pulmonary rehab is specially designed to help patients with lung diseases and those recovering after lung surgery improve their quality of life and reduce their symptoms. Those experiencing lung issues following a COVID-19 diagnosis can also benefit.
During this outpatient program, participants take part in supervised and monitored exercise, paired with educational sessions about managing lung disease, breathing more efficiently, and improving well-being. Our goal is to equip you with the information and resources you need to live your best life.
Comprehensive Resources to Help Improve Quality of Life
Lung diseases and lung-related surgical procedures can impact the very essence of living—the way you breathe. Through the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program, participants learn proper breathing techniques, steps for conserving energy in daily life, endurance exercises, and how to identify and respond to signs of fatigue.
Pulmonary rehab provides patients with a personalized strategy for breathing easier, with special attention on:
- Becoming more independent
- Decreasing symptoms
- Decreasing the risk of hospitalization and the need for emergency care
- Improving quality of life
- Increasing exercise tolerance
- Understanding your lung health condition
Lung Nodule Clinic
WTH offers the only comprehensive lung nodule program in the region, using the most advanced diagnostic equipment available anywhere in the world. The Lung Nodule Clinic at West Tennessee Healthcare helps patients through every step of lung nodule diagnosis and treatment and offers smoking cessation services as well. Lung nodules, or abnormal growths in the lungs, are very common and can be benign or cancerous. Most patients don’t experience any symptoms with small lung nodules, and early diagnosis and prompt care has been proven to save lives with cancerous nodules.
Through the Lung Nodule Clinic and other pulmonology services, patients have access to a extensive range of diagnostic and treatment options. These include a low dose computed tomography (CT) scanning for detection of lung cancer and other conditions as well as pulmonary rehab and expert treatment of asthma and COPD.
The Lung Nodule/Thoracic Oncology program is a multidisciplinary team of specialists, including pulmonologists, thoracic surgeons, radiologists, oncologists and more. There is even a nurse navigator to help guide patients and families throughout the care process, from the initial appointment through observation and treatment.
Your doctor may recommend a lung biopsy if a lung nodule appears on a lung cancer screening test. A nodule may also appear on a chest X-ray or CT scan performed for other reasons.
During a lung biopsy, your doctor removes a sample of cells from the nodule. The sample is analyzed under a microscope to determine if cancer cells are present. If cancer cells are present, examining the cells allows doctors to determine the lung cancer type.
There are several ways doctors can perform a lung biopsy. You should discuss your options with your doctor to determine which approach is best for you.