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Re:My Life After a Heart Attack at 38 by tptacek on Sunday January 20, 2019 @10:56PM (#18957527)
Do you have any medical training? There are at least two HN users commenting on this thread who do; one of them is a cardiology fellow(!). What they're saying seems to be getting drowned out by a lot of HN-style axiomatic reasoning.

Have you read much about overtreatment in cardiology? There's currently a minor scandal in the US about unnecessary cardiac procedures being performed. [cardiology overtreatment] is a good Google search term for this.

It's easy, on a message board, to say "I want the extra attention, damn the cost". That's especially true when you just read an article about a "widowmaker heart attack", so that the upside of excess attention is the only thing about the issue that's cognitively available to you. But these procedures can do harm as well as good.

Re:My Life After a Heart Attack at 38 by dwild on Monday January 21, 2019 @02:07PM (#18962665)
You talk specifically about over treatment but what the previous comment seems to refer is about misdiagnosis. Diagnosis where because it's very unlikely, doctor simply prefer to ignore this possibility.

My SO nearly died because she was "too young" to have a thrombophlebitis, yet every signs pointed to that, yet they could have simply tested for it. She not only is incredibly lucky that a better doctor was not too far and heard her complains, she was incredibly lucky that even though it took so long for her to be treated correctly, that she still have her legs.

Maybe over treatment is an issue, maybe cardiology is an inexact science right now and it's impossible to get a good diagnosis. It doesn't change the fact that misdiagnosis is bad and we should do everything we can to improve this, in every side of the coins, including mentioning when doctor just prefer to ignore conditions, because it's unlikely.

Re:My Life After a Heart Attack at 38 by tptacek on Monday January 21, 2019 @04:00PM (#18963565)
You keep referring to "misdiagnosis" when I think you mean to say "underdiagnosis".