misdiagnosis | Heart Sisters

Tag Archives: misdiagnosis

When your doctor mislabels you as an “anxious female”

Take it from me: the only thing worse than a heart attack is being misdiagnosed and sent home from hospital while you’re having it. And for women in particular, this is a tragically all-too-common reality. Research on cardiac misdiagnoses reported in The New England Journal of Medicine*, for example, looked at more than 10,000 heart patients (48% of them women) who had gone to their hospital Emergency Departments with chest pain or other significant heart attack symptoms. Women younger than 55 were SEVEN TIMES more likely to be misdiagnosed than men of the same age.

The consequences of this were enormous: being sent home from the hospital in mid-heart attack doubled their chances of dying.

Some of the most popular cardiac misdiagnoses that heart attack survivors have told me about include guesses like indigestion, menopause, stress, gall bladder issues, exhaustion, pulled muscles, dehydration and more. But perhaps the most distressing misdiagnosis to trip from the lips of an Emergency Department physician is “anxiety”. This one single word is instantly both dismissive and embarrassing. And worse, to have the diagnosis of “anxious female” recorded permanently on a woman’s chart virtually guarantees a definitive psychiatric stereotype for all future medical visits. Continue reading →

Tags: anxiety, Cardiovascular Research Foundation, diagnosing heart attack in women, Dr. Alexandra J. Lansky, gender bias in diagnosing women, misdiagnosis

Comments 23 Comments
Categories Diagnosing - and misdiagnosing

How to be a “good” patient

9 Aug

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

.
Here’s how to be a “GOOD PATIENT”:

Contract an acute illness.
Go see your doctor.
Get diagnosed.
Take your meds.
Get better.
Thank your brilliant doctor.

Now, here’s how to be a “DIFFICULT PATIENT”:

Contract a chronic, progressive illness.
Go see your doctor.
Take your meds.
Get diagnosed with something different. Many, many times.
Take your new meds.
Keep going back, because symptoms keep getting worse.
Get more tests.
Take different meds.
Get referrals to specialists. Many, many times.
Get more tests, more meds and more invasive medical procedures.
Keep going back.

You get the picture.

♥ This post was picked up by Better Health’s Grand Rounds on August 23, 2011.

Comments 14 Comments
Categories Cardiology 101, Diagnosing - and misdiagnosing, Living with heart disease

It wasn’t heart disease – but what was it?

14 Mar

by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters

Her medical nightmare started during the summer of 2008 when she was just 39 and began having terrifying heart attack symptoms. It’s taken well over two years for this mother of three from upstate New York to finally hear a correct diagnosis. Put on your diagnostician’s cap today and consider the chilling account of her experience, told in her own words over the past five months. Continue reading →

Tags: Costochondritis, depression, Grand Rounds, heart attack symptoms, Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia, Lyme disease, misdiagnosis, panic disorder, women and heart disease

Comments 29 Comments
Categories Diagnosing - and misdiagnosing

The ’18 Second Rule’: why your doctor missed your heart disease diagnosis

27 Jan

The trouble with Dr. Jerome Groopman‘s book, How Doctors Think, is that the docs who really need it won’t read it. But patients will, thanks to word-of-mouth buzz since it was published in 2007.

As a patient who has experienced a life-threatening misdiagnosis while having a heart attack, my own favourite part of the book is Dr. Groopman’s review of physicians who take cognitive shortcuts during patient visits.

This means that doctors can jump to conclusions about diagnosis or treatment options, and then can’t budge even when contradictory evidence subsequently emerges. “Blame the 18 Second Rule!” advises Dr. Groopman, professor of medicine at Harvard.

“That’s the average time it takes a doctor to interrupt you as you’re describing your symptoms. By that point, he/she has in mind what the answer is, and that answer is probably right about 80% of the time.” Continue reading →

Tags: 18-second rule, anchoring bias, attribution errors in diagnosing, Dr. Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think, misdiagnosis, women's heart attacks

Comments 6 Comments
Categories Diagnosing - and misdiagnosing

Heart attack misdiagnosis in women

28 May

woman sad drawing

by Carolyn Thomas

A woman attending one of my heart health presentations told me of her recent trip to the Emergency Department of our local hospital, and an overheard conversation between the (male) doctor and the (male) patient in the bed next door beyond the curtain:

“Your blood tests came back fine, your EKG tests are fine – but we’re going to keep you for observation just to rule out a heart attack”.

A male patient is thus kept in hospital for observation in spite of ‘normal’ cardiac test results. But I and countless other females in mid-heart attack are being sent home from Emergency following ‘normal’ test results like his, and with misdiagnoses ranging from indigestion to anxiety attacks to menopause. Why is this? click to continue reading

Tags: diagnosing heart attack in women, heart attack symptoms, misdiagnosis, misdiagnosis of heart disease, prinzmetal's angina, widowmaker heart attack, women and heart disease