I thought I’d start a thread that focuses on symptoms which should have you go to the emergency immediately. It could save your life or health. Many we are aware of, of course, but perhaps some we are not. We know about heart attack symptoms, and we know that if you have symptoms of retinal detachment, you go to the emergency IMMEDIATELY, to save your life or your eyesight. But there are other symptoms we sometimes tend to ignore at our peril. I know I myself frequently thought “oh, it’s something random, it’ll pass”, and then it would transpire that a one-off sudden tooth stabbing pain that passed in minutes and never came back, eventually resulted in a root canal, and I might have spared myself that had I gone to the dentist immediately. But some are more serious. Here is something I never heard of before, and where you need to RACE to the ER immediately, or suffer perhaps permanent complete hearing loss in an ear, you must take measures immediately - Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss (SSNHL):
Let’s get this ball rolling: What other symptoms mean - Go To The Emergency Immediately!
I Woke Up Deaf in One Ear: My Sudden Hearing Loss & Recovery Journey | Simon Hill | The Proof EP 384
As an Emergency Physician … the list of things you shouldn’t rush to the ER for is WAY longer and for each Emergency I see currently, I see at least 10 cases of things that are definitively not an Emergency.
I’ll give a few examples (addressing the initial question of some emergencies):
-Cardiac Ischemia - be aware by age 70 years, over 1/2 of myocardial infarctions occur with no significant chest pain … have associated symptoms, general weakness, breathlessness, nausea, sweating. Most chest pain presenting to the ER is not cardiac
-Pulmonary embolism - can present with no chest pain (for massive central PE’s) but instead low blood pressure, breathlessness, for small/moderate typically pleuritic chest pain, breathlessnss, faster heart rate and sometimes with a preceding unilateral swollen limb (where there is a DVT)
-Constant abdominal pain with fever, Tearing Chest pain, Abdominal pain radiating to the back, acute unilateral testicular pain in a male <35 years of age (as this is when torsion becomes rare), sudden pelvic pain in a women of reproductive age - especially with right shoulder tip pain (ruptured ectopic pregnancy)
-Stroke like symptoms
-Signs/Symptoms of septicemia
There are hundreds and hundreds … some of them rare - the ones above are fairly common … BUT most individuals e.g. 90%+ who do a Google search on their symptoms and come in worried about some emergent cause don’t even need any testing - they are fine to go home as Google doesn’t understand the context and all the conditional items involved and commonly has individuals present concerned without having stipulated the full clinical context in order to have a certain diagnosis even be a sensible consideration.
Can you please clarify… it reads to me like you are saying DO NOT go to the emergency room if you have “stroke like symptoms”, but that can’t be right.
