Summary
The symptom pain behind the breastbone or even retrosternal pain can be a sign for many diseases of internal medicine or even orthopedics. Some of them are acutely life-threatening, which is why further clarification should be carried out in any case. The urgency of the visit to the doctor should be determined by the general condition and the general disease burden.
For the assessment, the patient’s general symptom burden is decisive on the one hand, but the differentiation into respiratory and movement-dependent pain is also of great importance. Cardiac pain, i.e. pain emanating from the heart, is usually constant and can hardly be influenced by external circumstances. In any case, these should be clarified immediately. Gastric complaints and orthopedic clinical pictures, on the other hand, are usually not so acute and can usually be easily controlled within the framework of an outpatient therapy.
All articles in this series:
