What are the relationship between preventive health care and physical examination

Physical examination is a pre-emptive core link in the preventive health care system. The two are not subordinate relationships, but mutually embedded and linked health management actions, which together form the core line of defense for early prevention and control of diseases.

Don’t tell me, in the seven or eight years I have been doing health missionary work in the community, I have seen too many examples of the two being separated. Last year, when I was following up on patients with hypertension in my area, I met 62-year-old Uncle Zhang. He always felt that he had a strong body and skipped the annual free physical examination at his workplace. When he thought about it, he would make some chrysanthemum tea and drink it. He thought this was a good preventive health care. That time, it was free at the roadside in the community. After measuring his blood pressure, his systolic blood pressure reached 168. He was taken to a community hospital for a special screening and found out that he had early-stage hypertension and kidney damage. If he could have included annual routine physical examinations in his health plan and detected abnormal blood pressure and intervened early, he would not have been able to reach this point.

Nowadays, there is indeed a lot of controversy about the relationship between the two. There is a group of people who think that physical examination is all about preventive health care. They spend thousands for a full physical examination every year. When the report shows that there is no abnormality, they completely let go. They stay up late, drink alcohol, eat heavy oil and salt, and do everything. They do not realize that the physical examination only takes a "snapshot" of your body at the moment. Follow-up daily preventive health care actions such as adjustment of work and rest, intervention of chronic diseases, and control of risk factors are the key to truly helping you maintain the bottom line of health. There is another group of people who have gone to the other extreme, saying that physical examinations are just an IQ test, and that detecting thyroid and breast nodules when they are not sick will only increase anxiety. It is better not to check, and soak some wolfberry and take some health supplements even if they are doing preventive care. But if you really wait for obvious symptoms to appear before seeking medical treatment, it will often be delayed to the stage where the intervention cost is high and the prognosis is poor.

In fact, to use a very common analogy, preventive health care is like the full-cycle maintenance you do for your private car. You usually add regular oil, avoid particularly damaging road conditions, and do minor maintenance regularly. These are all areas of daily health care, and physical examinations are your annual Motor vehicles are inspected online, and annual inspections are only done casually. No matter how good the car is, it is prone to hidden faults. However, no matter how much you take good care of your car, you cannot detect hidden problems such as hidden wear of brake pads and aging circuits with the naked eye. This requires professional inspection to find out.

Last month, a 22-year-old girl who had just graduated came for consultation. The company’s physical examination revealed that the uric acid level had reached 580 μmol/L. She was still confused. She said that except for drinking ice milk tea and eating crayfish two or three times a week, she had no other discomfort. She also never felt joint pain. Based on her physical examination results, we adjusted her diet plan and asked her to drink 2 liters of warm water every day. Avoid high-purine and high-fructose foods, and check again after 3 months. The uric acid has dropped to the critical value of 420 μmol/L. If she had not had this physical examination and continued with her previous habits, she might have had a gout attack in two or three years. This is actually that the physical examination pointed out the precise direction for subsequent preventive health care, and there was no need to blindly take supplements or follow the trend of useless health programs.

Nowadays, many professional physical examination institutions have also moved in the direction of "combination of examination and management". They will not just throw you a thick report, but will customize a follow-up preventive health care plan based on your physical examination abnormalities, family history, and daily routine. In the final analysis, these two things are inherently tied together. Preventive health care without the support of physical examination is like a blind person, and a physical examination without follow-up health care is almost a waste of money.