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Man Complains About Earache, Then Doctors Realize It’s His Heart
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. A cardiologist has warned about unusual symptoms that could relate to a serious heart issue.
Cardiologist Kaustubh Dabhadkar, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is an expert in preventive cardiology. He told Newsweek his patients often ask "about symptoms to watch out for."
"We typically respond with the typical textbook symptoms —chest pressure with exertion that radiates to arm or jaw—because it's difficult to cover all the symptoms," he said.
"The typical symptoms are easy to diagnose and hard to miss. It's the opposite with atypical symptoms— hard to diagnose and easy to miss."
A 2025 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that more than 99 percent of people who developed coronary artery disease, heart failure, or stroke, had at least one risk factor before their diagnosis.
These risk factors include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, or being a smoker or former smoker.
Dabhadkar has now reiterated a cardiology "rule" to other physicians using an anecdote from his time as a cardiology fellow in a hospital, warning that the heart "has no private line for pain."
Writing in a post to his Threads account @heart.doc.kd, he recalled being asked to look at a patient who had an "earache"—but as a busy cardiologist working at 2 o'clock in the morning, he at first thought he had "a dozen better things to do" than look at a man who had "ear lobe pain."
But he was then told to look at the EKG—it revealed the patient was having a heart attack .
An EKG, also known as an ECG or electrocardiogram, is a test to check a patient's heartbeat by recording the electrical signals in the heart. The results can help diagnose heart attacks and irregular heartbeats.
The EKG showed that a "major artery" in the man's heart was "shutting down," and it was clear the patient was "in real pain, the kind nobody fakes"—and all of his pain was in his ear lobe.
"We opened the artery. The ear stopped hurting."
He said his story was meant to remind doctors that heart issues can cause unusual symptoms as the nerves of the heart "land at the same spinal junction as your chest, shoulders, arms, neck, jaw and upper belly. The brain gets a signal and guesses at the sender.
"Sometimes it guesses wrong. That is referred pain."
Dabhadkar told Newsweek that symptoms of a heart attack "can be as unusual as cold sweats that don't improve despite sitting under a fan or blowing cold air," but patients "often try to explain away their symptoms with the simplest explanations."
"So, unless patients are aware about atypical presentations, a lot of them are not going to come in for further evaluation."
Dabhadkar said that roughly a third of heart attack patients had no chest pain. And while most under the age of 65 get that pain, past the age of 85 it is rare.
Symptoms that might get missed as being from a heart attack can include pain in the jaw , teeth or throat and upper back, and breathlessness or heavy fatigue with no pain.
He becomes suspicious around "new" and "unexplained" symptoms that are "brought on by effort and better with rest," symptoms that are "spreading rather than staying in one spot."
"Arriving with a cold sweat, nausea, or a sense that something is badly wrong," he wrote. "Two or three of those together and I want an EKG."
He warned that physicians shouldn't add "ear lobes" to a heart attack checklist as it was "one case" in an entire career.
Still, he would "rather see a hundred false alarms than miss one real heart attack."
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