your body's most panic-inducing typo — could be heartbreak, could be actual heart, rarely tells you which.
means any discomfort in the chest region, ranging from harmless muscle strain to a genuine cardiac emergency, and the maddening part is symptoms overlap constantly.
from medicine has tracked chest pain as a diagnostic puzzle since ancient greek physicians linked it to the heart, but the term angina pectoris — latin for strangling of the chest — was coined by william heberden in 1768 to describe the specific squeezing sensation of cardiac origin.
costochondritis — inflamed rib cartilage, mistaken for heart attacks in thousands of er visits yearly
myocardial infarction — kills roughly 805000 americans annually per cdc data
gerd flare — acid reflux burns so convincingly it fools cardiologists routinely
pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in the lung, sudden and lethal within hours