the giving effect  2025      15 
Radical idea to national standard
Across most of the country, when patients came in 
with a heart attack, hospitals relied on clot-busting 
medications. Those helped only half the time and 
carried bleeding risks.
The alternative — guiding a catheter into the 
coronary arteries and inflating a pinpoint balloon 
to restore blood flow — was still considered radical 
and practiced at only a few academic centers 
worldwide.
By the time Stuckey arrived in Greensboro, one 
question was beginning to reshape the field — a 
question that would define the next 40 years of 
his career:
What if, rather than waiting to see whether a drug 
might dissolve the clot, we could treat a heart attack 
immediately by opening the blocked artery?
The commitment to pursue an innovative treatment 
for heart attacks at a time when most centers 
wouldn’t consider it had taken shape under Drs. Bruce 
Brodie, Richard Weintraub, Joseph LeBauer and Jeffrey 
Katz, who had been pushing the field forward, one 
patient at a time.
Stuckey stepped into and strengthened that ethos. 
As the work advanced, he moved from learning alongside 
his colleagues to helping shape the program’s direction.
Living the future 
“It didn’t take me more than three or four weeks here 
to realize that the angioplasty patients were doing a lot 
better than the ones being treated with clot-busting 
drugs,” Stuckey recalls.
When he reflects on those early years, he thinks about 
the power of everyone pointing in the same direction. 
“We wanted to be innovators in always trying to do 
the absolute best things for our patients. We’d often 
say, ‘What would Dr. Joe do?’ — a nod to the culture Dr. 
LeBauer created. It has always been about doing the right 
thing for the right reasons.”
From his first weeks on the team, Stuckey had seen the 
difference that mindset made. Nationally, the field was 
still weighing its options, but in Greensboro, the decision 
had already been made. Here, they were living the future.
Case by case, positive patient outcomes accumulated — 
more arteries opened, more heart muscle preserved, more 
families spared sudden and devastating loss. 
“Opening the artery with a balloon was more effective,” 
Stuckey says. “It led to better recovery of muscle and 
lower death rates. That innovation is probably the single 
most important in cardiovascular medicine over the past 
50 years. What we did really changed the way heart 
attacks were treated worldwide.” 
Inside and outside Cone Health, LeBauer Heartcare 
physicians gained a reputation as medical mavericks 
— clinicians who put evidence and outcomes ahead of 
convention. Their shared focus was to make balloon 
angioplasty the standard of care. 
“There’s been more than a 90% reduction in heart-attack 
mortality from 1977 to 2022,” Stuckey adds. “Today we 
often discharge patients within 24 to 48 hours, and they 
barely know anything happened.”
PICTURED Dr. Brodie, above left, and Dr. Stuckey were 
among those who earned reputations as “medical mavericks” 
— clinicians whose work, alongside dedicated colleagues, 
helped set a standard for innovation.

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