When a person suffers a heart attack, it is a scary, painful, hectic, and often confusing experience.
One thing is clear, though: the person must get quick and effective medical treatment or the possibility of their health being permanently affected is high.
A heart attack, particularly one that is not promptly treated, can cause permanent heart muscle damage, stroke, heart aneurysm, complete heart failure, or even death.
In fact, over 400,000 Americans died from cardiac arrest in 2006 alone.
Unfortunately, some of these deaths surely resulted from the fact that emergency room personnel sometimes misdiagnose heart attacks as other, much less serious conditions.
While an extremely severe heart attack may run little risk of misdiagnosis, many are less obvious in nature.
Symptoms of these more clandestine heart issues may include dizziness, indigestion, sweating, backache, shortness of breath, and nausea.
These symptoms may lead a mild or even moderate heart attack to be mistaken for much less serious conditions such as gastrointestinal problems, heartburn, anxiety attacks, pneumonia, bronchitis or panic attacks.
While bronchitis may require medical treatment of some sort, it hardly compares to the attention with which a person who is suffering or has recently suffered a heart attack should receive.
Cardiac arrest can have a huge effect on a family.
Even if the person survives, they may have lasting medical conditions that put an immense amount of stress on their loved ones.
The victim may have to miss work for a very long time, leading to heavy financial stress.
These money problems can be compounded by immense hospital and medication bills.
If the individual's heart attack was misdiagnosed, the consequences to their health may be worse than if they had received appropriate treatment, and thus all of these secondary effects will be more pronounced, as well.
If the negligence of an emergency room medical professional has caused you or a loved one to suffer unnecessary harm from an emergency room misdiagnosis, you may want to consider filing a medical malpractice lawsuit.
If a medical care provider fails to meet the basic standards for their field and does not provide for the wellbeing of their patients, they should be held accountable for their actions.
They may be found liable and be required to pay compensation for damages to victims.