Free Republic

Most people can spot the classic symptoms of a heart attack: chest pain, shortness of breath, and radiating pain in the neck, back, jaw and arms. But there may be a gender divide. While symptoms can vary greatly by person, studies show that men are more likely to exhibit classic signs. Women often experience symptoms not typically associated with heart attacks, which can appear weeks before the actual event, known to doctors as an acute myocardial infarction(AMI). --snip-- But in a study financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists focused on female heart patients, 515 of them. They found...

Everyone was talking about the Illinois ruling when I entered the ED staff break room before my shift. The news story was clipped from our local paper and pinned to our bulletin board, with the title highlighted in yellow and the word "READ THIS" scrawled in bold red marker above the headline. It was the topic of conversation for days, and dominated a full two hours of the ED consortium in which I participated. Every ED in the country is going to be taking a hard look at their triage systems. It is always a good thing to take a...

Being an ER nurse, I tend to fasten my attention onto cases such as this one. According the the AP story, a 49-year-old woman came into the ER complaining of chest pain, nausea, and shortness of breath. (Okay, all you nurses out there: pipe down and let the laypersons catch up.) She is triaged, classified "semi-emergent," and instructed to wait for her name to be called. Two hours later, when the woman's turn to be seen had arrived and her name was called by the triage nurse, the woman did not respond, The nurse approached the woman and found her...