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 took 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 five months. Continue reading “It wasn’t heart disease – but what was it?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
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 “The ’18 Second Rule’: why your doctor missed your heart disease diagnosis*”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
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 admitted to hospital for observation in spite of ‘normal’ cardiac test results – as current treatment guidelines require. 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 or menopause. Why is this? click to continue reading
Heart Sisters 