The leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease. Every 33 seconds someone dies of it. One in every five deaths is due to heart disease. This is not earthshakingly new information. We have many effective treatments for heart disease. Why does it cause so much death?
While there are many answers to this question, I want to focus on the ones that relate to medical malpractice.
Simply put, many medical professionals are too quick to pass off the symptoms of heart disease as something more benign. This is especially true if the presenting symptoms are not classic for a heart attack. If you are a middle-aged or older male and you present to an emergency department with crushing left-sided chest pain, you are almost guaranteed that your heart attack (myocardial infarction) will be recognized and treated. Change any one of those factors and the likelihood of a correct diagnosis begins to drop. It behooves you, therefore, to be your own best advocate so you don’t end up face down on the floor at home because someone mistakenly told you your condition was not heart related.
Some advice.
Get started early. Very often heart disease shows symptoms before there is a heart attack. For a significant majority of people there are signs and symptoms for weeks or months before a heart attack. Do not ignore these. Especially if you are older, new symptoms in the upper body are not good. If you have any symptoms which might be heart related, go see a doctor for some tests. The internet will give you a lengthy list of the symptoms which might be the result of heart disease. If you discover your heart disease before you have a heart attack, appropriate treatment will lessen the chance you will have a heart attack in the first place. If you still have a heart attack in spite of treatment, a pre-existing diagnosis of heart disease will greatly increase the chances that a doctor at the emergency department will correctly diagnose your heart attack.
Don’t go to Urgent Care, if you are concerned about possible cardiac symptoms. For one thing, they do not treat chest pain patients. If they think you may be having a heart attack, they are going to send you to the nearest emergency department. Additionally, they are not as well-trained or experienced in diagnosing heart attacks. They are more likely to misdiagnose you than the doctors at the emergency department. Most importantly, going to an Urgent Care facility only delays your arrival at the emergency department. In a heart attack, time is tissue. The longer it takes you to get to the emergency department and begin treatment, the more damage is going to be done to your heart. Go there first and don’t delay dithering around at home trying to decide whether this is a heart attack or not. Go and let medical professionals make that decision. Better a false alarm than a fatal face plant on the living room floor.
Don’t be too quick to accept the assurances of the folks at the emergency department that it is just gas or benign chest wall pain. I have seen a lot of people so relieved to hear that they are not having a heart attack that they go home and don’t return to the hospital, even when their symptoms persist or get worse. Be a pain in their behinds, especially if things get worse after you get home. Go back or go to another emergency department.
Those figures above don’t lie. One in five people who die in the United States die of heart disease. Don’t be among them.
