How To Evaluate Chest Pain Like a Doctor
Anyone can think like a doctor if they know what to think about.
Chest pain can be a serious symptom depending on its cause. But 99 out of 100 times, it is not very dangerous. Knowing how to evaluate chest pain is usually left to the doctor. But if you know how a doctor thinks and can analyze your own chest pain in a similar fashion, you may be able to determine what to do next.
The list of dangerous diseases for people that present with chest pain is rather small but includes problems that can lead to significant disability and even death. These include heart attack, blood clot, dropped lung, pneumonia, tearing of the aorta blood vessel, or esophagus rupture. This is why chest pain causes a large amount of anxiety in our society and brings many people into the emergency department for an evaluation. This is the job of the emergency physician — to rule out dangerous diseases.
There are certain tests that can only be done in the emergency department so unfortunately, you cannot trade the advice in this article for the full evaluation and workup that can be done by a physician. But I also think it’s important for the general public to understand what might and might not be dangerous. And there are ways that physicians think about chest pain, an algorithm so to say, that can be a…
