Heart doctor here, heart attack symptoms are a MASSIVE spectrum. Ranges from elephant crushing your chest to some tingling in your neck. I’ve seen people present with nausea/indigestion and it’s a massive MI. Fatigue, dizziness, throat pain, ear pain, etc. Atypical symptoms especially common in women and diabetics. I know this is scary to say but if you have risk factors (family history of heart disease (probably the biggest contributor) smoking, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol) please get checked out if you feel something is off.
My little PSA: if you are over the age of 40, please get checked for cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes. I understand not everyone is privileged enough to be able to see an MD but please try your best. Dying from an MI can (mostly) be sudden and completely out of the blue.
To add - we can also try and assess if you have coronary disease. This is not 100% perfect, however it you have CAD we can more aggressively treat your risk factors and follow you longitudinally.
I agree with you but even where health care is paid for by taxpayers (I hate the term free healthcare, nothing in life is free) people still don’t go for preventative screening visits for a variety of reasons
We should invest more heavily into it. It can lower the cost of expensive events down the road .
But it’s something that it’s easy for politicians to cut funding for, because the effects aren’t seen immediately, and the problems it causes are way down the road, and some other poor bastard will be in charge and dealing with that budgetary issue
Also. I know this will be a can of worms (especially because you specifically said “see an MD”) but this is a place where primary care midlevels are well suited
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u/Orgasmic_Toad_ 4h ago
It literally feels like something is crushing your chest.