What is the relationship between preventive health care and physical examination

The two are essentially two core links that are connected and mutually supportive in the prevention chain - physical examination is the risk screening entrance and effect verification ruler of preventive health care, and preventive health care is the intervention path after physical examination finds problems. Health management without either party is incomplete.

I have been doing public health education in a community health service center for almost 7 years, and I have seen too many misunderstandings that separate the two. Either they have the mentality of "if you have done enough in daily health, you don't need a physical examination", a bunch of uncles and aunts make health tea and dance square dances every day. , I have been asked for free cancer screening and chronic disease screening several times, but I have not come forward, or I have spent thousands every year on high-end physical examinations. After taking a look at the report, I threw it away in the drawer.

Last year, the 62-year-old Aunt Zhang in the community was a typical example. She usually bought RMB 3,000 to 4,000 healthcare mattresses and Ganoderma spore powder without blinking an eye. She refused free lung cancer screening in the community for three consecutive years, saying that she must be fine if she doesn’t cough or have chest tightness. At the end of last year, her daughter forced her to have a low-dose CT scan, which revealed an 8mm ground-glass nodule. Pathology revealed that it was adenocarcinoma in situ. She didn’t even need chemotherapy after the surgery. Now when she meets people, she says that the money she spent on health care before was not as effective as spending hundreds of yuan on a CT scan every year.

However, there are now different voices in the industry. Many clinicians advocate that personalized physical examinations should be used as a precursor to preventive care. After all, most chronic diseases have no obvious symptoms in the early stages. Judging health status by self-perception is no different from being blind. You don’t even know whether you have high uric acid or high blood lipids. No matter how many health products you take, you may be putting yourself at risk. Click here; but some public health experts have reminded that many commercial organizations now combine physical examinations with preventive care for marketing, and often recommend unnecessary whole-body PET-CT and full set of tumor marker screenings. This not only wastes medical resources, but also causes unnecessary radiation and anxiety caused by excessive positive prompts, which will harm health and violate the original intention of preventive care.

In fact, if you use the two correctly, you can save a lot of trouble. In the past two years, we followed up a 34-year-old Internet operator with a family history of hypertension. He also paid attention to salt control and signed up for fitness classes. He always felt that his health was fine. Last year, we adjusted his physical examination items and added a homocysteine test. The result was that the value was twice as high as the normal value, indicating that he had a stroke. As a medium-to-high-risk group, his preventive plan was later specially supplemented with 0.8 mg of folic acid every day, and he changed his original high-intensity iron training three times a week to moderate-intensity aerobics. This year, the indicators have dropped to the safe range. Without that targeted physical examination, he might have an accident if he stayed up late and worked overtime one day.

To put it bluntly, the relationship between the two is like a pathfinder and a walker. For physical examination, you should first mark the pits ahead. For preventive health care, follow the marked path to avoid falling. If you don’t follow the marked path after exploring the path, or walk blindly without exploring the path, you will be the one who suffers in the end.