A Look Back: Mark Lurie, MD, Reflects on the Evolution of Cardiovascular Care at Torrance Memorial

When Mark Lurie, MD, started at Torrance Memorial Medical Center in 1979, he couldn’t have predicted how far the field of cardiology would evolve—or that Torrance Memorial’s Lundquist Lurie Cardiovascular Institute would grow to become the South Bay’s premier cardiovascular program. However, in the more than four decades that Dr. Lurie has been at Torrance Memorial, the institute’s cardiovascular team has been at the forefront of every major evolution in cardiovascular care—from emergency treatment to surgery to valve disease and heart failure care.

Today the Lundquist Lurie Cardiovascular Institute is ranked among Southern California's top heart care programs and is staffed by leading cardiologists across all subspecialty disciplines. The team offers a full range of treatment options across interventional cardiology and cardiac surgery to treat coronary artery disease, including new minimally invasive therapies and advanced catheterization devices to treat complex conditions. Torrance Memorial was also ranked by Newsweek as a World’s Best Hospital for Cardiology for the past two years.

“When I first started, the treatment for heart attack was bed rest, and little could be done to reduce damage to the heart,” says Dr. Lurie, physician emeritus and medical co-director of the Lundquist Lurie Cardiovascular Institute. “Over time, we learned emergently opening an artery could reduce muscle damage, and we found various ways to do this with clot-busting drugs, balloons and stents.”