News that U.S. President Donald J. Trump has a vascular condition may have simultaneously revealed that a substantial seven-figure vascular surgery branding campaign was starting to yield tangible results, and provided a singular opportunity to platform the specialty as the go-to vascular experts.
The Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) launched a multi-pronged branding effort last year in an effort to help vascular surgery become an instantly recognizable specialty inside and outside of the hospital. The Society and vascular surgeons at large have long sought avenues to broaden awareness of what a vascular surgeon does, and the comprehensive and longitudinal nature of the care they provide after a patient is diagnosed with a vascular condition.
Well, opportunity knocks: when it was revealed to the world in mid-July that the president had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), vascular disease was thrown into the media grinder and the press corps began dissecting what CVI is, what it means and what the prognosis might be. Step forward vascular surgery. In the immediate aftermath of the news breaking, vascular surgeons began populating the pages and airwaves of the world’s media. They laid out the facts of CVI and what Trump might—or might not—be looking at down the road.
Vascular surgery, vascular surgeons and the SVS were name-checked across the news media, from international broadcast platforms like the BBC, to domestic newspaper powerhouses such as the New York Times. That broad footprint, says William Shutze, MD, who led the SVS branding campaign from its earliest stages, seems to indicate vascular surgery is now firmly on the journalistic map. “I was excited to see the amount of engagement of the press with actual vascular surgeons compared to what we have seen in the past, where these types of vascular situations like the president’s CVI diagnosis come up and they may not even get anybody from the cardiovascular space,” he says. “That has still happened with this event,” Shutze points out, but vascular surgeons were prominent and not absent or overlooked for other specialists in the vascular space, like interventional radiologists or cardiologists, as has been the case in the past. “To me, this seemed to be transformative based on the amount of interview requests for which vascular surgeons were sought out.”
While Shutze can’t say for certain that the thick of vascular surgical voices among the voices contextualizing President Trump’s CVI diagnosis owed much to the SVS branding efforts, “it is either a great coincidence or this is the first tangible moment where we can say, ‘Yes, it’s working.’”
The Plano, Texas-based vascular surgeon counted no fewer than 20 vascular surgeons who were quoted across 49 different media placements amid the initial blitz after news of Trump’s condition broke. A few days on, after the initial furor had settled, Shutze says content that contained a vascular surgeon as the resource had amassed 1.1 million impressions. “I think we had 23 primary placements in global, national and some regional media outlets. Of those, there were 22 outlets that picked these up secondarily, re-purposing them.” Among others, Shutze listed BBC News, The Star of Kenya, Hindustan Times, National Geographic, NBC News, ABC News and Newsweek.
“One I was really excited to see was AARP [formerly the American Association of Retired Persons]: If we are on AARP’s radar now, that is great. That is the geriatric population, those over 55, the heart and soul of the age group we treat. They have a wide circulation of the media content they produce for their members. It was great to have a vascular surgeon represented as the expert on a vascular condition for the president among that population.” The vascular surgeon in question was Mikel Sadek, MD, the vascular surgery program director at NYU Langone Health in New York City, who told AARP that anyone who has a known vein issue and any symptoms of CVI should see a vein specialist.
“It’s worthwhile getting checked out,” Sadek was quoted as saying, adding, “People always think of varicose veins [and CVI] as a purely cosmetic or aesthetic issue, but it’s often far more than that.”
Shutze encouraged all vascular surgeons to consider joining the branding effort by engaging with their local media: “Is the juice worth the squeeze? I would say that, yes, this is our first tangible evidence [that the branding campaign] is working.”
