I’m a middle-age male with no past health problems and good blood pressure readings (110/70) and am having consistent but completely nonpainful chest spasms on the left side over the past month. Is it a muscle spasm or the heart? It seems just like a nervous muscle twitch or something. Has anyone else experienced this? Doctor visits for uninsured people cost about $200-300 nowadays and they tend to just hem and haw and not say much, probably since they know I can’t afford extensive tests, so I’d rather not go in for a 10 minute meet and greet.
Are you sweating? Shortness of breath? Heart beating fast? Feeling of doom?
If so, call 911 NOW! Worry about the money later. Your life is priceless…
No. I’m very calm with no sense of urgency or pain.
If it’s in your pectoral muscle, you should be able to see it in action. It happens to me. FWIW, my left eye will also twitch but not simultaneously. I know when it happens to me it’s a stress reaction, but I don’t have any formal medical diagnosis for any of this.
If you do not believe it to be a pectoral spasm, by all means get it checked out.
Okay, thanks, VunderBob, I’ll try to see it in action. It seems to be something harmless like that, though annoying because sometimes it will persistently do that for awhile. And I should probably go check my heart specs at the local pharmacy for free.
Dopers have died by ignoring things like this, so I think it’s worth having a doctor check it out. You don’t mess with chest symptoms.
Having sad that, I get a similar sensation when my Synthroid dose is too high. Heart spasms. Harmless in and of itself, but a symptom of something that needs fixing.
This has happened to me for as long as I can remember–brief, unsettling feelings of my heart fluttering/beating too fast/like a twitch or something, not painful at all but quite odd and uncomfortable.
Finally it started going off and on for hours, to the point that I couldn’t sleep, and I started panicking, imagining some kind of odd heart attack or something (I’m 34 and in general good health with no history of heart problems)…I was taken to the hospital and saw a cardiologist, who watched my heart monitor as my heartrate briefly skyrocketed from 80 bpm up to 180, then back down again.
He said, basically, it’s a type of tachycardia. Irregular heart beat that happens to most people, because your heart has one pacemaker but sometimes another part of the heart wants to be the pacemaker too, causing the heart to fire off extra beats. Harmless in a healthy heart. Uncomfortable but not remotely serious. He gave me a prescription for an incredibly low dose of metaprolol tartrate–so low that I could take it at will or not–and said that if that didn’t work, he wouldn’t up the dose but would recommend surgery, where they go thru the vein in the legs and basically burn the part of the heart that is firing and causing the irregular beats.
He also said I could cheerfully ignore the problem and that it was a problem of comfort, not health, that would make doing anything a necessity. He even did an echocardiogram and said it was as he thought; there is nothing at all wrong with my heart.
The prescription did indeed kill the problem, but I have stopped taking it for the last few days to see if the problem recurs.
I am not your doctor, and this is me we’re talking about, not you…but if you have no other symptoms–faintness of breath, difficulty breathing, sweating, pain etc.–if the only thing bothering you is the feeling of your heart muscle “twitching,” or fluttering…you could have a completely benign and harmless problem with your heart firing off extra beats.
I’m hoping it’s just temporary and will wait another few weeks before scheduling an appointment unless it starts causing pain or something.
I had a similar problem. It was pretty clearly my heart palpitating with no pain, although I never had an incident lasting more than two minutes (and that was a long one). Mostly they came and went in less than 30 seconds. My doctor said they were benign and would likely go away with exercise. They did. I never went for any tests beyond an EKG for my doctor to reach this conclusion so it might be worthwhile for you to visit a doctor because hey, its your heart.
Requests for online medical diagnoses by untrained personnel go in IMHO. (moved from MPSIMS)
As a middle-aged male you have a 1 in 2 chance of having a heart attack … I wouldn’t be waiting a few weeks.
(statistics may vary depending on your country etc)