Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Angina

  • No complaints, only symptoms

    Peter Arnold Sydney, Australia “No complaints, only symptoms,” I told my cardiologist this year. How dare I complain? I am eighty-four. Thirty-two years have passed since my quintuple coronary artery bypass; eighteen years since a diagnosis, in one of eleven biopsy samples, of invasive prostate cancer—left untreated, because so few of us die from it; five…

  • William Heberden on angina pectoris, 1772

    “There is a disorder of the breast marked with strong and peculiar symptoms, considerable for the kind of danger belonging to it, and not extremely rare . . . The seat of it and the sense of strangling and anxiety with which it is attended, may make it not improperly be called angina pectoris. Those…

  • Grokking: Cardiac rehabilitation by another name

    Janice KehlerChris KehlerMiddleton, Wisconsin, United States “It is a life-saving intervention,” said Dr. Randall Thomas, the director of the Cardiac Rehabilitation Program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, adding that participation rates were abysmal. Only 20% of eligible patients over the age of sixty-five enroll in cardiac rehabilitation programs, which is a troubling proclamation in…