Consumer Reports Health has released an alert about new guidelines for preventing heart disease in women, identifying certain risk factors that are especially important or unique to women, and some preventive measures that are not useful, including some supplements.
Texas author, artist and book industry journalist Melissa Mia Hall once wrote: “When I need help writing book reviews, my dog Daisy is always eager to lend a paw.” After trying to lift Daisy recently, Melissa felt an odd pain in her chest. She told her editor at Publishers Weekly that she had pulled a muscle. She later emailed a friend:
“Right now really hurting. Hurt my chest/back last night lifting Daisy wrong. She’s too heavy and I pulled a muscle, I guess. I thought at first I was having a heart attack it was so awful. Tonight I’m really hurting still. Ibuprofen’s not helping much. Using heating pad. It’s been a long painful day and hard to concentrate on much. Why now? Sigh… xoxo” Continue reading “Melissa Mia Hall, who couldn’t afford health insurance, dies of heart attack”→
“It’s definitely not your heart – it’s just acid reflux!” That was the first regrettable (and wrong) thing that the E.R. doctor said to me, despite my textbook heart attack symptoms of crushing chest pain, sweating, nausea, and pain radiating down my left arm. When I raised the topic of stupid comments on Inspire’sWomenHeart online community, cardiac survivors jumped right in.
These women were all too happy to share some of the real-life comments that physicians have actually said out loud to them. Most of these dismissive comments were made shortly before these patients subsequently had to undergo life-saving cardiac procedures. Each comment is true; the names of the physicians have not been disclosed in order to protect the stupid (a word, by the way, which I’m using here in its most charitable dictionary definition: “lacking common sense, dazed, unable to think clearly”). Here goes: Continue reading “Stupid things that doctors say to heart patients”→
Laura, a 40-year old American heart attack survivor, told me this story of her own cardiac event:
“I was asleep and my symptoms woke me up. I had several simultaneous symptoms, but the first one seemed to be chest pain in the centre-left, somewhat under my left breast area. I’d never felt anything like it, so sometimes it’s hard to describe – it wasn’t sharp or crushing or burning, more like a dull pressure. I also had pain down the inside of my left arm that radiated up into the left side of my jaw and my left ear.
“I was very overheated, and I felt like I was going to throw up. The nausea and overheating faded, but the pain – chest, arm, jaw – stayed. In hospital, I was diagnosed with a heart attack caused by SCAD – spontaneous coronary artery dissection, treated with six stents.”
Consumer Reports Health has released an alert about new guidelines for preventing heart disease in women, identifying certain risk factors that are especially important or unique to women, and some preventive measures that are not useful, including some supplements.
Heart Sisters 