Failure To Diagnose Heart Attack And Heart Disease
What to do in a situation involving a failure to diagnose a heart attack and heart disease? Watch our video below and learn more about early diagnosis and diagnosing heart disease.
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Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:18 Index Of Suspicion
0:35 Timely Diagnosis
1:18 Reperfusion and Sequelae
It’s virtually impossible to fail to diagnose a heart attack today.
0:18 Failure to Diagnose Heart Attack and Heart Disease: Index Of Suspicion
If one has a reasonable index of suspicion that a patient is suffering a heart attack which usually involves chest pain, maybe with excessive sweating which is called diaphoresis, and maybe with chest pain that radiates particularly to the left arm.
0:35 Timely Diagnosis
If you have any of those symptoms, you should immediately consult a healthcare provider because again, all it takes to diagnose a heart attack is a simple blood test to show whether you have any heart muscle enzymes in your blood that would go along with death of the myocardial or heart muscle cells. Again, you want to diagnose a heart attack as early as possible.
1:18 Reperfusion and Sequelae
You want to get the patient potentially on some blood-thinning agents as soon as possible and early initiation of drugs, so-called clot busters may halt a heart attack in its tracks and allow the heart to be re-perfused, minimizing damage to the heart muscle and perhaps leaving the patient with really minimal adverse sequelae. These folks can usually resume a normal lifespan. They may have to go on medication for heart disease, but even taking that medication, they can still lead a very good life.
In regard to heart disease, we talk a lot about angina, which is basically just chest pain that occurs usually due to a decrease in blood flow to the heart muscle. These patients have chest pain. Again, they may have profuse sweating, they may have pain that radiates into the left arm, they may grasp their chest. These are symptoms that must be evaluated by a healthcare professional, perhaps early on with blood work, simply to be sure that the patient’s not had a heart attack. There may be a place for echocardiography to determine if the heart is beating and pumping properly. There may be a place for cardiac catheterization where intravenous contrast is actually injected into the coronary arteries to be sure that the heart is getting enough blood. Remember, a heart attack is solely due to the heart not getting enough blood.
Multiple interventions, angioplasty placement of a stent, in some cases, coronary artery bypass grafting, are all effective at treating heart disease. Again, the real issue here in timely diagnosis is that yes, there is very effective treatment available if you’re diagnosed early. So don’t take it for granted. Have these studies done, see your healthcare professional, and again, allow him or her to sort through the various diagnoses when diagnosing heart disease and then receive effective treatment.
If you or your loved one has been permanently or seriously injured due to negligent diagnosis of a heart attack, contact the Medical-Legal team at LawMD.
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