– posts here focus on how difficult it often is to get an accurate heart disease diagnosis in women
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Mistakes happen in medicine, just like in every other workplace. As intensive care physician and president of The Doctors’ Association UK (DAUK) Dr. Samantha Batt-Rawden reminded us in a BBC Newsnight interview:
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” If patients are looking for a doctor who has never made a mistake, they simply won‘t find one.”
Continue reading “Learn or Blame: when mistakes happen in medicine”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
For most of us, feelings of anxiety or panic are occasional, mild and brief – the body’s normal responses to being worried or scared. I never thought of myself as a person who was prone to experience anxiety or panic – until I survived a heart attack. I can now tell you quite confidently that there are few things in life that are more anxiety-producing than being in the middle of a frickety-frackin’ heart attack. . . . . Continue reading “Panic attack – or heart attack?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
My interest in women’s misdiagnosed heart attacks began after my own misdiagnosed heart attack. Despite textbook cardiac symptoms of central chest pain, nausea, profuse sweating and pain down my left arm, I was confidently told: “You’re in the right demographic for acid reflux!” – and sent home from the Emergency Department.
I know that, had I been appropriately diagnosed and treated on that fateful day, I’d have little interest in this topic. But I wasn’t. So I do. . . Continue reading “Women’s heart attacks (still!) more likely misdiagnosed than men’s”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I walked out of our local hospital’s Emergency Department after having my textbook heart attack symptoms misdiagnosed as acid reflux. Much later, my increasingly debilitating cardiac symptoms were finally correctly diagnosed (same hospital, different Emerg doc). But after my hospital discharge, my pushy family and friends kept asking me about that first visit to Emergency: “Why didn’t you demand to see a cardiologist? Why didn’t you ask for more tests?”
As I was soon to learn, that is so NOT how most health care systems work – especially for female patients. . . Continue reading “Women’s heart disease: wrong symptoms, wrong words or wrong diagnostic tools?”
Heart Sisters 