Non-Cardiac Chest Pain/Costochondritis

Chest pain is one of the scariest and most concerning symptoms for patients and doctors alike.

The most pressing concern is if the pain is coming from the patient’s heart, whether they’re having a heart attack. ER physicians are trained to look for and treat conditions that most likely would endanger the patient’s life, to properly diagnose these life-threatening conditions, and to treat them accordingly. If and when the chest pain is determined not to be of cardiac origin, through blood tests, x-rays, and EKGs, then the emergency room physician generally assumes that it is gastric in origin and usually prescribes an antacid or an acid reflux medication, assuming then that the patient has gastritis. The patient is then sent home, and the problem is that the patient’s symptoms generally continued to persist, and if the antacids don’t work, the patient does not have an answer for their chest pain. They are chest pain can also be diagnosed as costochondritis, and they might be given anti-inflammatories instead. By the way, that would not be good for the patient if they are diagnosis was stomach related.

Osteopathic physicians who are trained in OMT can use other skill sets to diagnose the problem especially if it is a musculoskeletal origin (we are the Swiss Army knife of physicians). If we do find subluxations in the thoracic spine, this could explain the anterior chest pain as a radicular symptom. There are many safe OMT methods that can put these subluxations back in place, and the patient’s symptoms should resolve immediately.

 I have also modified some OMT techniques to be safe even in cases of elderly or osteoporotic patients, and these can be found in the secure section of this website.