Explain why the severity of physical symptoms in a panic attack often leads patients to seek medical rather than psychiatric help first.

A panic attack produces genuinely alarming physical symptoms — palpitations, chest pain or tightness, shortness of breath, dizziness — that closely mimic the presentation of serious physical illness such as a cardiac event, and these are frequently accompanied by an intense fear of dying. From the patient's own perspective in the moment, this looks and feels like a medical emergency, not a psychiatric one, so seeking urgent medical attention is an entirely reasonable response to how the episode actually feels, rather than a misjudgement. Recognising this pattern is clinically useful precisely because it means panic attacks are commonly first encountered in emergency or general medical settings, where the physical presentation needs to be weighed alongside, rather than instead of, the psychiatric explanation.