To Stress or Not to Stress?
/One of the challenges I have on the inpatient service is the amount of stress tests we perform. Everyone knows the admission: some guy with atypical chest pain gets admitted, we don’t think it is cardiac but go ahead and stress them and send them home. The question I have is whether we should be stressing these patients. If a patient has chest pain that does not sound like it is cardiac in etiology, if they have a positive stress test does that suddenly mean the chest pain was cardiac in origin, or did we just happen to find an incidental finding. I suspect it is the latter. Then the question comes up, do we need to fix incidental findings?
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