Would it surprise you to learn that heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in this country? It kills one out of every five women – yet most medical professionals still tend to think of heart attacks as a “man’s disease.”
Despite decades of information that should, by now, have made a difference, women are less likely to be accurately diagnosed when they’re having heart attacks than men. Even when they actually receive an accurate diagnosis, they’re often at a more advanced stage of the process, making it much more likely that they’ll suffer permanent damage to their bodies or even die.
What’s going on?
One of the root causes of this problem is that there has been a historical bias in medical research. Clinical trials and studies on heart disease (along with many other conditions) almost exclusively focused on men. As a result, the medical community’s understanding of what heart disease and heart attacks looks like is based on male symptomatology.
Women can have heart attack symptoms that are similar to men, such as the “classic” chest pain and pressure, but women may report subtler signs of trouble, such as:
- fatigue
- shortness of breath
- nausea
- vomiting
- back pain
- jaw pain
- dizziness
- a vague sense of being unwell
- lightheadedness
Far too often, these symptoms are dismissed as something like menopause, stress, anxiety or even indigestion. This minimization of their symptoms can lead women to delay seeking medical care even when their symptoms worsen – and providers to overlook what’s happening right in front of them before it is too late.
If you’re a woman whose heart attack was misdiagnosed – or you loved a woman whose symptoms were ignored by medical professionals until it was too late – you have legal options. Medical malpractice shouldn’t be allowed to continue.