Failure to diagnose a Heart Attack

Somewhere around 1.5 million heart attacks occur each year.  These are Acute Myocardial Infarctions or otherwise known as (AMI, Acute MI or heart attack).  Many of the people with heart attack present to an emergency room for their first treatment.  The symptoms are what you might expect,

  • crushing pain in their chest,
  • radiating pain to their arms (often the left) and
  • difficulty breathing. 

Of the people who make it to the emergency room with a heart attack, up to 8% of them are sent home from the hospital without treatment and having been misdiagnosed. This is an example of heart attack medical malpractice. Not all of them are malpractice, but if the right symptoms were presented (and many times they are), and those symptoms are missed or interpreted incorrectly, then it can be malpractice.

Some of the tests that are done at the ER for heart attacks are:

  • Electrocardiogram (This does not always show evidence of a heart attack)
  • Blood work (Looking for dying heart muscle)
  • Echocardiograms (To visualize the heart)

Some common mistakes made by doctors or medical staff include:

  • depending on the first electrocardiogram that showed no heart attack (remember that this result can be wrong)
  • Not believing that a young person or a woman could be having a heart attack because of their age, or
  • jumping to a conclusion such as shoulder strain.

There are actual cases where people have been sent home with a diagnosis of shoulder strain, instead of the heart attack they were having.

Here is a link to a recent court case involving a failure to diagnose a heart attack.  This news story is from Florida. www.gainesvilleregister.com

Update 5/12/05:  I just read a short blurb in a legal reporter that we get here.  It was reporting an anonymous case against a hospital where a man entered an emergency room complaining of pain in his back and pain radiating to his arms.  The doctor diagnosed him with shoulder pains gave him a prescription and sent him home.  He died that night of a fatal heart attack.  The case settled for over $2 Million.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Medical Malpractice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.