Chest Pain
Ahhh, chest pain. My favorite, your favorite. Chest pain can range from benign to completely lethal, which is why health care professionals often develop sympathy chest pain when evaluating the patient with chest pain.[1] The differential diagnosis for chest pain is a long one. Buckle up and here we go!
Etiologies
It is best to divide the causes of chest pain into systems: cardiac, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, hematologic, psychiatric, and other bullsh*t.
Cardiac - The old ticker is potentially a ticking time bomb, and that's we have to take it seriously. The list of cardiac causes runs long:
- Myocardial ischemia - This results from supply-demand mismatch or someone scaring the sh*t out of you.[2]
- Aortic dissection - If you can avoid dissecting your aorta, we highly recommend it.
- Pericardiitis - We recommend against heart inflammation.
- Heart failure - Not just CHF exacerbation, but CHF exasperation as well.
- Arrhythmia - This can include A-fib, B-fib, C-fib, V-tach, W, tach, and X-tach.
Pulmonary - This list is pretty damn long too. The lungs hate playing second fiddle to the heart, so it has nice list of its own:
- Pneumonia - See Pneumonia.
- Pneumothorax - Blame the intern who did it.[3]
- Pulmonary embolism - See Pulmonary Embolism.
- Reacting airway disease - Includes asthma and COPD. Tell those lungs to stop overreacting.
References
- ↑ Intern Has Mild Troponin Bump Over Patient’s Mild Troponin Bump (Gomerblog)
- ↑ New Surgical Jason Masks Loved by Nurses, Doctors (Gomerblog)
- ↑ July Intern Really Excited to Cause His Very First Pneumothorax (Gomerblog)
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