Description
A delay in diagnosing or treating a heart attack can be considered medical malpractice. Thanks to his medical background, attorney Guy Regev understands what steps doctors are expected to take when a patient may be experiencing a heart attack. If you have lost a loved one to a heart attack, our lawyers can review the details of your case to investigate whether a doctor or other medical professional committed malpractice.
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Heart attacks are most often the cause of a clot, which propagates through a blood vessel and results in a coronary artery, one of the arteries that supply the heart being blocked. Heart attack is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. And it is crucial that heart attacks are diagnosed early and that the treatment that is rendered for the heart attack is timely.
There are two major types of heart attacks. One is called a STEMI, which stands for ST-elevation MI. MI stands for myocardial infarction. What all that means is that this is a type of infarction, which is death of heart tissue, that is associated with certain findings on an EKG or an echocardiogram which measures the electricity running through the heart. ST refers to one of those electric findings in an echocardiogram.
The other type of heart attack is called an NSTEMI, which is at non-ST-elevation MI. That is a type of heart attack, which is not associated with changes in the ST-segment of the echocardiogram.
Both are heart attacks and both have to be worked up in a proper manner. There are strict guidelines within the U.S. medical community with regards to how quickly heart attacks need to be diagnosed and treated once a patient gets to a hospital. In fact, there are terms such as door-to-needle time, which refer to the time period which passes between the time that a patient presents to the hospital door and the time in which a needle is inserted into the patient in the operating room often by a cardiologist.
