Think like a cardiologist

If you've ever stood at a patient's bedside — ECG in hand, monitor alarming — and felt the gap between what you studied and what you actually needed to know, I built this course for that moment.

Cardiology is one of the most mechanism-rich disciplines in medicine, and that's exactly what makes it rewarding to master. But too much of how it's taught skips the physiology and jumps straight to algorithms. The result is clinicians who can recite a management checklist but can't explain why a patient in cardiogenic shock has cold, clammy extremities, or why the ST changes in lead III and aVF tell you something fundamentally different from those in V1 through V4. When the algorithm doesn't fit the patient in front of you, that understanding is the only thing that saves you.

Core Cardiology is structured the way I believe medicine should be taught: mechanism first, always. We start with anatomy and hemodynamics — not as review, but as the operating system for everything that follows. Pressure-volume relationships, preload and afterload, the Frank-Starling curve — these aren't abstract concepts. They're the reason you choose one intervention over another in a deteriorating patient. Once that foundation is solid, the clinical content that builds on it becomes intuitive rather than memorized.

From there, we move through every major domain of clinical cardiology: electrophysiology and ECG interpretation, cardiovascular imaging, coronary artery disease, heart failure and cardiomyopathies, valvular disease, arrhythmia management, and cardiac emergencies. Each section is taught with the same discipline — understand the pathophysiology, recognize the clinical pattern, apply the evidence-based framework. ACC/AHA guidelines are referenced throughout, not as gospel to be recited, but as the distillation of evidence that should inform — not replace — your clinical reasoning.

I want you to finish this curriculum and feel a specific thing: confidence. Not the false confidence of having memorized a protocol, but the grounded confidence of a clinician who understands what the heart is doing, why it's doing it, and what the evidence says to do about it. That's what I've tried to build here, and I'd be honored to have you work through it.

Welcome to Core Cardiology. Let's get to work.