Evaluation of chest pain. Back to the basics of history taking and physical examination.

Although careful history taking and physical examination seem to have been supplanted in some parts of modern medicine by expensive and high-tech laboratory tests, evaluation of chest pain is an exception. It still depends on careful attention to the basics of a directed line of history taking and physical examination. Careful correlation of the details elicited with the pathophysiology of myocardial ischemia leads the astute clinician through the maze of various causes of chest pain to the proper final diagnosis.