A pain in the chest?
When someone feels a pain in the chest, it’s important to keep a cool head and try to figure out all you can about said pain. This may sound a little strange and heartless, because people in pain really shouldn’t have an obligation to analyze the pain their going through. But knowing some things about the pain you’re experiencing and telling your doctor about them will help him or her diagnose whatever is affecting you a lot quicker.
Pain in the chest can be a symptom of many things. Hiatal hernia symptoms, for example, include chest pains. So a chest pain can mean a lot of things, from respiratory problems to heart conditions. So the first step in identifying your pain is knowing where it hurts.
If the pain is in the left side of your chest, there is a big chance that it is a heart attack or any other heart condition, so you should see your doctor immediately. A pain in right chest area, however, is very unlikely to be the result of a heart condition. It can be something simple like a mild respiratory problem, resulting from flu or a particularly hard cough, or something a little more complicated and life threatening like lung cancer or tuberculosis.
Another important thing to keep in mind and tell your doctor is the intensity of the pain. Honestly, it is not necessarily the case of the more it hurts, the worse the condition is. People often feel sharp pains in the chest when coughing because they have a cold or a mild congestion of the respiratory ways, and those conditions will often go away in a few days. However, symptoms of, for example, lung cancer often don’t include a very acute pain in the chest, at least not in the early stages, but rather mild pain or discomfort. There is a chart to determine various levels of pain, but all you really need to know is if it’s mild, medium or sharp.
Finally, asides from place and intensity of the pain, you should tell your doctor how frequent the pain is. And not only how frequently it happens, but also how long it lasts once it starts and whether or not it varies throughout episodes. For example, I once had a lung issue that started out with a mild discomfort in the right chest area which escalated to a medium throbbing pain before it went back to mild.
