A majority of people only go to the doctor when they feel sick or when they think something is wrong. While it is good to do so when you suspect you are sick, the illness or condition you have may have already progressed so far that there is little your doctor can do to prevent complications or further issues. To combat this, doctors recommend regular preventive health screenings, preferably annually. There are numerous types of preventive health scans that can help catch illnesses early, and this article will explore their benefits and show you why they are so important.
Peace of Mind
Before we talk about the medical benefits of preventive health scans, we need to discuss your peace of mind. There is nothing as peaceful as knowing that there is nothing wrong with you and that there are no illnesses lurking around waiting to take you down. You get to enjoy life more when you are in this mindset.
Preventive health scans will give you an overall view of your health, so you know how healthy you are and if there is anything you need to be concerned about. If there is, you can rest easy knowing the doctors caught it early, and you have enough time to intervene before things become more serious and complicated.
They Help Detect Underlying Health Conditions
The majority of illnesses and everyday conditions are easy to spot. For example, everyone knows how having a cold feels, and a doctor can diagnose one with a quick check. However, it is a lot harder and more complicated to detect underlying illnesses and conditions you are predisposed to. There are no symptoms to look at until the disease or condition has progressed enough to start causing symptoms.
Preventive health scans check for the illnesses you are predisposed to, to know how much you are at risk of developing them. When it comes to illnesses like diabetes or arthritis, for example, a health scan can check signs of the illness or condition and let you know if you are at risk.
Additionally, regular checks can help identify whether the risk of developing these illnesses is increasing. It is normal for the risk of certain illnesses and conditions to increase as we get older, and you should keep an eye on the risk level of the conditions and illnesses you are predisposed to.
They Prevent Serious Health Complications Down the Line
Preventative health scans are meant to catch illnesses and various conditions early, and before they become serious. When conditions such as cancer or high blood pressure are left unchecked, they end up causing a lot of devastation and complications to patients. These issues are mitigated if they are caught early enough, giving doctors enough time to come up with treatment plans. The result is better health outcomes without serious future complications for patients.
There are several preventive health scans for those who are concerned about their health, want doctors to catch any potential issues early enough, and want to avoid complications of diseases and conditions they are predisposed to. The two main types of preventive health scans are CT scans and MRI scans.
Although the issues CT scans and MRI screening can detect often overlap, each of these tests has some areas where it performs better than the other. You can get both scans through CT and MRI service providers like Ezra. To help make things easy, Ezra explains the difference between a CT scan vs MRI, so you know which is better suited for what you need. For example, MRI scans are better suited for soft tissue scans, while CT scans are better suited for certain cancers. Ezra’s team of medical professionals can guide you on scheduling a scan without a doctor’s orders and set an annual schedule for preventive health CT and MRI scans.
Preventive Health Scans Reduce the Cost of Healthcare
It is often easier and cheaper to prevent a disease or intervene early than to treat it. When you think about conditions like diabetes, obesity, and their related complications, you begin to see why it would be better to catch them early. Diabetes, obesity, and related conditions call for a partial or complete change to your life, changes that would be easier and cheaper if they were not too drastic.
In addition to costly changes to your lifestyle, treating health complications is typically very expensive. Treating them can deplete your savings or require finding other ways to pay for the healthcare you need. Even in cases where you have insurance, you might find your premiums or deductibles going up because your insurer paid for a huge hospital bill or sees you as a liability.
It Improves Life Expectancy
Many of the conditions that are prevented or caught early during regular preventive health scans can significantly negatively affect your life expectancy. Early detection helps you and your doctor prevent the disease, treat it early enough or put proper management plans in place to reduce its severity in the future.
Early detection of conditions such as cancer, obesity, and high blood can reduce the risk of these conditions becoming fatal in your future and shorting your life expectancy. In cases of obesity and high blood pressure, preventive health scans that catch them early can significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks. They also prevent the development of related conditions such as diabetes, which can be devastating and come with their own complications.
They Help You Become Conscious of Your Health
For many people, there is little incentive to change how they take care of their health because there is no definitive evidence that what they are doing is not working or is bad for them. A preventive health scan that checks every part of the body to identify potential health issues can give you the jolt you need to start taking care of your health better.
Such scans can reveal areas you have neglected because you think it did not matter. Learning how healthy or unhealthy you are can motivate you to change things in your life.
They Will Help You Remain Healthy for Longer
Naturally, our health will deteriorate as we age. While there is little that we can do about that, there is something we can do to keep our health intact as long as possible, and that is through preventive health scans. Regular scans that catch most health complications can help prevent your health from deteriorating too fast.
Going for the right tests at the right time can be crucial in helping with this. For example, you can ask your doctor to include an eye test in your annual health. This scan can detect underlying issues such as diabetes or high blood pressure, causing blurred vision. You can then put measures in place to take care of all three simultaneously and remain healthy for longer.
Many people, especially young people, put off preventive health scans because they do not prioritize their health. However, preventive health scans become more critical as we get older, and the need to keep our health intact becomes paramount. These preventative health scans also come with some benefits, including helping keep us healthy as long as possible, helping prevent the progression of illnesses we already have, and letting us learn of the risks we are at regarding our health.