Hearts don't start beating differently for no reason, right? right??!

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

This thread is inspired by a non-diagnosis given by my doctor. I love my doctor, she has been great… but when I started having heart flutters over a month ago and a rapid heartbeat (90-100bpm) every day all day (even sleeping), I figured something was very wrong. 50+ flutters a day and sweating. They tested my thyroid - nothing. Holter monitor found nothing (except fast HR)… no anemia, drink limited caffeine… no major changes in health. I’m on daily prescrip meds, but have been for years and don’t think they’d all of a sudden cause my heart to go WACK.

Doc puts me on beta blockers, my heart is back to a normal ryhthm, but she has ZERO explanation for what is causing it. How is the heck does this happen with no explanation?? I don’t want to be on heart meds forever! She said “a lot of women in their 30’s develop this for no reason”. Really??? Why have I not heard of it.

Anyone else ever heard of this strange phenomenon?

#2

I would guess it’s stress based. I get the same thing if I am under a lot of stress at work or in my personal life. I have also come to realize that even if I don’t FEEL stressed (I feel positive, like I can do everything I need to do, I don’t worry about it much), if there’s a bunch of stress in my life, I’ll feel it in my heart. It’s sort of become my first clue that something is going on in my mind that I’m not really fully aware of.

#3

As a nurse? All the time. Arrhythmias happen. Most of the time we don’t know why. They’re usually easy to treat with a beta blocker. Sometimes something like mitral valve prolapse seems to be involved, but not always. It’s not unusual in medicine for things to happen that there’s no detailed explanation for - but that doesn’t mean we don’t know how to treat it effectively.

If you want/need a more detailed explanation or workup, you always have the option of seeing a cardiologist, but the end result is most likely to be just about the same.

#4

You’d be surprised at how little medicine knows about a lot of things. We know a ton of stuff, but there is even more that we don’t know. For a lot of conditions, we don’t really know the ultimate cause - it’s just sort of, “hmm, that’s interesting, not sure why it happened but here’s what it is and here’s how we fix it”. For other conditions, we know something about risk factors or part of the explanation, but we don’t really know the whole story. Even for well-studied conditions like coronary artery disease, we’ve identified environmental, behavioral, and genetic risk factors, but we still can’t predict all that well who is going to keel over from a heart attack or how they get from risk factors to symptomatic disease; there’s even still debate and ongoing research about inflammatory and infectious contributors to its development.

#5

My heart goes into a-fib when I’m low on potassium. The first few times it went back into rythym after they gave me some big old horse pills filled with potassium. The next few times we needed to treat it with some meds.

#6

Soooo, how do ‘big old horse pills filled with potassium’ differ from ‘meds’ then??

Anyway, how’ya doing now Mr Ed?? :smiley:

#7

I make the following small nuance: potassium is a needed mineral - one I (and you too) need all the time. Due to the way my plumbing is laid out, it also one that I don’t absorb well.

Fleccanide (if I’m remembering the name correctly, I’m too lazy to go look at the label) is a drug that is used to get the heart back into rhythm. Some doctors prescribe a much smaller dose to help keep some a-fib sufferers’ hearts in rhythm, but it is not something that you would ever see on a list of daily required vitamins and minerals.

In the case above, if I had been absorbing the potassium that a human needs, I would never have needed to be treated with a drug that humans don’t need.