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UW Medicine’s lung care and lung transplantation services, located at Harborview and UW Medical Center in Seattle, combine pulmonary and critical care medicine, thoracic surgery and lung transplantation to provide the highest quality patient care for the entire spectrum of pulmonary and critical care illnesses.
UW Medicine’s lung care service is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of specialists dedicated to providing expert care for pulmonary and critical care illnesses requiring medical or surgical treatments with emphasis on asthma; emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD; chronic bronchitis; acute lung injury, including acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS; cystic fibrosis; pulmonary fibrosis; sarcoidosis; neuromuscular disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and muscular dystrophy; pulmonary hypertension; pulmonary complications of AIDS; sleep disorders; pulmonary rehabilitation; pulmonary thromboendarterectomy; lung cancer; lung volume reduction surgery; lung transplantation surgery and minimally invasive thoracic surgery, such as video-assisted thoracscopic surgery, or VATS.
UW Medical Center has the only active lung transplantation program in the Pacific Northwest, serving patients in Washington, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Oregon. In 2009, our surgeons performed the 500th lung transplant.
Harborview’s pulmonary and critical care medicine team is a world leader in improving treatment of the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Each year in the United States, 200,000 people suffer acute lung injury. The condition is associated with 75,000 deaths and 3.6 million hospital days. Thanks to the medical discovery and patient care at Harborview, patients with ARDS now have much better chances of surviving.
UW Medicine has one of the world’s leading experts in interstitial lung disease. The UW School of Medicine participates in the National Institutes of Health-sponsored IPFnet, a network of 22 medical centers across the United States that excels in the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The network’s goal is to find effective therapies for patients with both the early and advanced stages of this devastating disease.
Medications for Asthma
A short-acting bronchodilator, a medication that relaxes the airways, is usually prescribed for all people with asthma, and may be the only medication prescribed to people with mild and infrequent asthma symptoms.
People with more frequent asthma symptoms (more than 2 times per week) will often need to take daily medication to reduce inflammation of the airways and improve lung...
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Ganesh Raghu, M.D.
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Dr. Raghu is a UW professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and director of the Interstitial Lung ...
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Non-invasive Assisted Breathing
Jesse Watson has had Duchenne muscular dystrophy since early childhood. He credits his productive life in part to the non-invasive assisted breathing devices that he has used for years. Dr. Josh Benditt talks with Watson about how the devices help him and other patients with neuromuscular diseases to breathe, cough, and sleep, and how his surgery differs from the more traditional tracheostomy.
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