Know your heart for hearts sake

When I was staying in the center of Bangkok a few years ago, I had the most unfortunate experience.

Chest pains in the middle of the night, so painful I could barely walk! What did I do? I managed with the aid of a friend to take a tuk-tuk to a Bangkok hospital. I was taken in, hooked up and tested right away. The whole affair was a panic and a rush, I heard the mention of heart attack or heart failure but, fortunately the doctors could find nothing wrong with my heart and it was suggested that I’d had cramp of the chest wall muscle or very severe indigestion. Being not entirely convinced, plus hypochondriacy being one of my favourite past times, I decided to look it up at the heart institute.

The heart consists almost entirely of muscle, which differs from ordinary muscle in that there are no apparent boundaries between fibres and cells. The essential property of the heart muscle is the rhythmic contraction without any outside stimulus. Which means the heart will work automatically without the need to respond to nerve impulses such as with other muscles. The sole function of the heart is to pump blood from the veins into the arteries. The heart is hollow and when its walls contract, blood is squeezed out and the valves ensure that the flow is only in one direction, truly a remarkable device. This rhythmic contraction (beating) is an inherent property of the heart and left to its own devices will contract at around 140 times a minute. An essential function of the heart muscle is that it expels whatever volume of blood enters, at rest the volume of blood pumped will be approximately 70 ml to 200 ml when exerting per single heart beat, therefore in extremes when the heart beats to over 200 beats per second, the volume of blood pumped in one minute could reach up to 50 litres!

Healthy heart

As the heart has only one function, to pump all the blood it receives from the veins into the arteries, in a sense it has only one disease, failure to do so. So the word ‘heart failure’ is misleading as I had discovered in the Bangkok hospital emergency center, it does suggest that the heart no longer functions and the patient ought to be dead! But in medical terms it in fact means that the heart works but not as effectively as it should. To really find out whether your heart is working properly, a full heart and medical examination would be necessary. (Something that I’d neglected to do). In a heart examination, the state of the whole patient will reflect the state of the heart, therefore an assessment of the not only the heart but also a full physical and examination would be necessary. Doctors advise that men over 39 years of age should have a regular heart examination at least once a year. And if it’s not provided by your government as it is in countries like Japan, you should arrange and pay for the medical procedure by yourself, and for the price of a dinner and a few bottles of wine, it’s well worth it! In recent years Thailand has been the place to go to have medical checkups and treatment, hospitals like the SVH Heart Institute of the Samitivej Hospitals in Bangkok and Sriracha can offer first rate medical examinations and treatment at less than half the cost you would pay in say the U.S or Australia. From diagnosis and prevention to treatment and rehabilitation of a variety of heart and vascular problems, Samitivej hospital the heart and medical institute of Bangkok offers excellence in the subject of Cardiovascular medicine.