Practicing as a cardiologist in Rochester, New York,
for the last two decades, I have been posed with a variety of very
interesting questions by my patients. It is intriguing to see how little
our community knows when it comes to the most critical part of
corpus humanus.
Missing and misinterpreting the early symptoms of a heart attack, thereby misdiagnosing and mistreating this disease is the greatest miss of all in medicine. “This will never happen to me”… “I can hack it with some antacids”… “It is only a chest cold”… “It looks like stomach upset”… “Some kind of a flu”…
“I would rather have a drink”… “I didn’t want to wake you up”… “I didn’t want to bother anybody”…are some of the silent soliloquies of my patients in the early minutes of their symptoms while actually an acute heart attack was already in the making. Let me share with you some of these questions and my thoughts
on it.
- Theckedath Mathew, M.D.
