This article presents a brief group psychoeducational treatment for non-cardiac chest pain, supplemented with a composite case study. Patients present to emergency rooms for chest pain they believe is a heart attack symptom. When cardiac testing is negative, this pain is usually a panic symptom, often occurring with a cluster of other panic symptoms. Group therapy challenges faulty beliefs about the origin of their chest pain and offers an alternate explanatory model. Breathing retraining and other strategies to lower physical arousal reduce the duration and frequency of panic (chest pain) episodes. These new skills can eventually break the continual cycle of panic and anxious apprehension.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.