Gil Schorlemmer, MD

Cardiac, Vascular and Thoracic Surgery

Gilbert R. Schorlemmer was born in Victoria, Texas the same year that the Russian Sputnik first circled the earth sparking a race to space that dramatically influenced the education of American youth. With a natural aptitude for science and math he readily excelled, graduating salutatorian of his high school class with a 101.25 grade point average. His mother and father, both career educators in the public school system, encouraged his intellectual growth and development while keeping him well grounded through hard work on the family’s farm and ranch, teaching him the value of honesty, personal integrity and persistence.

He was a National Merit scholar at Texas A & M University where he worked his way through school with jobs as a ranch hand herding cattle and stringing barbed wire fence, a construction worker building facilities at state parks, a teacher’s aide in the elementary summer school, a roughneck on an oil rig, and an orderly in the local hospital, He again excelled finishing the four year premed program in two and a half years with a Bachelor of Science and graduating summa cum laude with a 4.25 grade point average.

Highly recruited by multiple Texas medical schools he chose to attend the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas where he again graduated with honors. It was in Parkland Memorial Hospital of Kennedy assassination fame where his manual skills and intellectual talents became focused on surgery. He subsequently went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his general surgical residency where he was given the prestigious Womack Award as the most outstanding surgical scholar in 1983, based in large part on his keen understanding of cardiovascular physiology, his intuitive ability in the management of critically ill patients, his considerable technical skill the performance of the full range of surgical endeavor and his enduring persistence in an unflagging commitment to the best patient care.

His first venture into Utah occurred as a cardiovascular surgical resident at the University of Utah Affiliated Hospitals, the LDS Hospital, and Primary Children’s Medical Center. He soon fell in love with the region’s many beauties, spending his few spare hours boating at Lake Powell, climbing in the Wasatch mountains, hiking in Yellowstone Park, and exploring the rock formations of the Moab area. After finishing his advanced training he resolved to stay in the Rocky Mountains and was selected to start the only open heart surgical program in southern Colorado at Pueblo in 1985.

The next ten years he spent building an open heart surgery center of excellence, which served two main hospitals and five outlying facilities in the region. With an independent mobile surgical team he performed over six hundred major cardiac, vascular, and thoracic surgical procedures in 1991. He was the first physician in Colorado to use laser recanalization and stenting in the peripheral arteries, the first surgeon to routinely perform total arterial revascularizaton for coronary artery disease and the only cardiac surgeon to routinely implement fast track care in open heart surgery producing the quickest return to normal function for his patients.

He subsequently returned to the Salt Lake valley to raise his children and continued his commitment to progress in cardiac surgery, instituting protocols, which halved the length of stay and greatly improved patient care and patient comfort while reducing overall cost. Before he could truly settle down however, a call came from friends and family imploring him to move to south Texas where a new cardiac surgery program needed an experienced hand to guide its growth, providing both quality and cost effectiveness. He was given the task of designing the cardiac surgical facility in the brand new regional medical center in Laredo, serving patients not only from south Texas but also northern Mexico. He accomplished this goal with striking success, creating a cardiac surgical masterpiece whose results easily bettered those seen at more famous centers in Houston and San Antonio as evaluated by Medicare in 1996 and 1997. He pioneered the use of intrathecal pain control in cardiac surgical patients greatly limiting the pain experience for his patients allowing quicker mobilization and earlier return to normal activity. It was here that he developed many of the techniques that he uses today to perform off pump coronary bypass, eliminating the need for the heart lung machine with all of its potential complications and producing a more rapid and secure recovery from surgery.

Despite this tremendous success he still longed for the charms of Utah with its Rocky Mountain beauty. He returned in 2000 to raise his second family, again bringing new ideas and significant technical expertise to the medical community. The only surgeon in Utah with robotic surgical experience he developed a new and better way to harvest the internal mammary artery, the most important bypass graft conduit. He continued to refine the off pump operation enabling virtually all patients with coronary artery blockages to have coronary artery bypass performed without the need for freezing the patient, for stopping the heart or for using the heart lung machine, providing a more rapid return to a normal life. Almost a quarter of his coronary bypass patients can be discharged home on the second day after surgery. He resumed his longstanding commitment to less invasive approaches to the treatment of aneurysmal and obstructive disease of the arterial tree. He is the first and for some time the only Utah physician certified to deploy the Gore TAG endovascular graft for diseases of the thoracic aorta. He has one of the state’s largest experiences with the endovascular repair of abdominal aneurysms and is an active proponent of peripheral endovascular reconstruction, offering patients an overnight stay with minimal pain after aneurysm repair or extensive revascularization of the lower extremities. He is currently working to establish a center for laser transmyocardial revascularization of the heart for patients in whom angioplasty and bypass grafting are not successful, a heart failure center with access to artificial heart technology for both short and long term support, and an endovascular center where catheter based valve replacement will eliminate the need for an open surgical procedure.

Dr. Schorlemmer routinely performs aortic and mitral valve repair and replacement, coronary artery bypass grafting, atrial fibrillation correction surgery, open and endovascular aneurysm repair, open and endovascular reconstruction of upper and lower extremity blood flow, and carotid artery reconstruction for the prevention of stroke as well as thoracic surgical procedures involving the lung, esophagus, diaphragm, and chest wall. He feels it is an honor to participate in the care of his patients and does his best to individually apply a combination of existing methods and evolving technologies to provide the best results for each of them.