Can Healthy Lungs “Collapse”?

My last blog entry talked about costochondritis, a common frustrating but benign cause of chest pain in young people. Today I would like to talk about a much less common but potentially far more serious cause of chest pain in young adults- pneumothorax, more commonly known as a “collapsed lung”. If images of television’s Dr. McDreamy dramatically inserting a chest tube into an ER patient pop up in your head, please keep in mind that this medical issue only occurs in just over 1 in 100,000 people in the United States per year. In my private clinical practice, I saw … Read more