Respiratory medicine is plagued by the same tendency as other fields to write off a woman’s symptoms as anxiety without searching more deeply for an organic cause. Lindsay Lief, an ICU/critical care/pulmonary specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, tells me she’s trying to change this, saying, “I’m constantly drilling into my residents: anxiety is a diagnosis of exclusion in the hospital. You must first prove that you have explored everything else. I don’t want to hear, ‘I think she’s just anxious,’ when a patient presents with shortness of breath.”
