Dull Pain in Chest

When most people have or think of a dull pain in chest, they immediately think of a heart attack when in reality, it could be a number of things beyond that. Did you know that stress can cause you to have a dull pain in your chest? It can and often does far more frequent than a heart attack does although heart attacks do happen pretty frequently themselves. The point is, don’t freak out if you don’t have any of the other more common symptoms of a heart attack. Stress can cause a tightening in your chest that can feel very alarming. If you don’t have any other symptoms, try to breath deep and relax. Much like a stress or tension headache, your muscles tighten and tingle and much like exercising, once your muscles have been tense for a while, it can leave a dull ache or pain that’s actually affecting the muscles in your chest rather than your actual chest. Another more common possibility for experiencing a dull pain in your chest is gas. Gas sucks and can definitely make you think that something might be wrong with your heart. If you’ve had gas in your chest and you don’t know it and you take a deep breath like normally. You might feel a very sharp pain right over your heart or very close to it. Out of fear you let the breath go quickly and grab your chest. You breath in deeply again only more slowly and the pain is still there, you shake it off, forget about it and later realize that the pain is gone when you breathe in…what was it…gas. Gas is not only annoying but it can move around in your cavity and can become extremely uncomfortable. Chest pain is one of the most frightening symptoms a person can have. It is sometimes difficult even for a doctor or other medical professional to tell what is causing chest pain and whether it is life-threatening.

But when and if chest pain is life threatening, it will be more than a dull chest pain. It will generally be a severe, crushing and/or squeezing that lasts longer than a few minutes and moves further up into your neck or jaw or left arm. Quite different description isn’t it? Besides muscle pain in your chest, other parts of your body can cause chest pain like your bones in that area, your throat or esophagus and even your lungs. Whenever you’re having severe chest pain, I think it goes without saying that you need a doctor or hospital fast. There is also a such thing as displaced pain. That is when one area of your body is in pain or infected and it causes a pain in a different part of your body. I know about this situation where someone had a toothache and believe it or not, they had a heart problem and ended up having to have a bypass surgery or open heart surgery. Weird, but true. Work on keeping up with your yearly physicals so that any small problem (dull pain in chest) can be detected early and remedied before it turns into a larger issue (severe pain in chest).