Preventive Care

The term “preventative care” is an overarching term that encompasses everything that you generally visit your GP for. Treatment and diagnosis are often included in a GP visit, unless you need to be referred to a specialist. However, that trip to the doctor you make on a yearly or bi-yearly basis is all about preventative care, though the term isn’t often thrown around in regard to your visit. So, just what is it and how can you start leveraging your yearly doctor’s visits to start creating an excellent preventative care plan that's tailored just to you? Take a look.

Preventive care is defined as health care that targets and shifts your current health trajectory. In other words, it’s a health care practice that recalibrates your health goals and helps you develop healthier habits. Once you’re relatively healthy, your visits to the doctor should become more about maintaining wellness and increasing your good health more than anything else. It’s there to ensure that, before you feel any unpleasant symptoms or have to have a treatment plan designed, you’re already taking steps to prevent those issues as you go. Preventative care doesn’t just cover a guideline for a healthy lifestyle though, it also includes other services like screenings, lab tests, counseling, immunizations and much more. All of these different aspects are designed to make life easier and to prevent future illnesses before they become a real problem.

Preventative care is something we all know as “technically unnecessary.” However, that’s only true if you’re unafraid of both the repair and the repair costs down the road. For example, if you don’t do your due diligence on your air conditioning unit, and you don’t schedule the occasional maintenance appointment, it’s going to break down. You’ll need to pay for the diagnosis, repair and potential replacement of the unit. Preventative care is the same idea, except that if you neglect your body for as long as you would your air conditioner, things would be far less simple. For while a “repair,” might be a possibility, a replacement of any serious organ is an extreme issue. If you could prevent further hardship and the medical cost of that hardship down the line, wouldn’t you?

When you invest ahead of time in real preventative care, you’re investing in your own longevity as well as your bank account. Hospital visits are extremely expensive in the United States and unfortunately fairly common. However, thanks to the emphasis placed on preventative care by general physicians everywhere, the percentage of people that need to suddenly go to the emergency room for long-term issues that could have been prevented, is going down.

However, this is still a problem that needs to be addressed, as many people with and without insurance still view the emergency room as their only way to access health care. They forget all about the benefits offered by urgent cares, or even just more regular visits to the GP. When people go to the hospital and can't afford their bill, the hospitals and the ER cannot refuse their care. Thus, that cost is spread evenly among all paying customers over time. This is part of the reason the healthcare industry’s services regularly increase in price at such an alarming rate.

Ease up on your wallet and the hospital’s resources. Invest in the preventative care you need now. Reach out to Hill Family Medicine to pursue the health care you need now.