Keeping Healthy

If you work hard, four or five days a week, you probably don’t want to spend your days off at the doctor’s office, doing what it takes to maintain good health. But you don’t realize how much your family, friends and employer count on you to be as healthy as possible. Being healthy makes you able to do what you do and if you let your health go, you might not only be unable to help your family

make ends meet, you may become a burden to your family.

You need to consider preventative health examinations from the time you reach adulthood. There are certain tests you need at certain times of your life and it is important to keep up with them in order to detect disease earlier in the course of the illness, when it is most treatable.

You need first to know your medical risk factors. This means looking at your family history, your habits, your level of exercise and whether or not you are obese. Some of these things can be changed quite quickly so that you can eliminate them as risk factors. You then need a complete physical and complete blood work in order to identify what you are at risk for.

Health needs a proactive rather than a reactive approach. You need to understand what you are at risk for and get screened regularly for these things so you don’t get caught unawares. If you are an executive, your employer may offer executive screening exams, both at the beginning of your employment there and periodically thereafter. The examinations are designed to meet your specific needs and take about six to eight hours to complete.

The examinations can do the following things: They can screen for heart disease using an ECG or a stress ECG. They can evaluate your risk for stroke or aneurysm of the brain. They can help you screen for colorectal cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer. Full lab studies are done to make sure your liver works, your kidneys work and your cholesterol panel, which can tell you some of what your heart disease risk is, can be drawn and can tell you a lot about what’s going on inside your body. Vision screening and glaucoma testing can be done by a licensed optometrist or ophthalmologist. Doctors will review your vaccination history and give you those you have not had or are not up to date. Women especially can have bone density studies to see if they have osteopenia or osteoporosis.

A really good examination will conclude with experts on nutrition, stress and fitness. These things are so important to your health that you need to have them take a look at these areas of your life to see if there are areas of improvement. After the physical is done along with the other assessments, you can develop a road map to optimal health so you can continue to be the productive person you have always been. You will know what it is you are needing in terms of further studies or changes in your lifestyle that will need to keep you at your best.