Should I see my Doctor when I’m healthy?
I’ve heard it stated in countless different ways, that a patient’s assessment of how healthy they are is based off of when the last time they went to the doctor was. Or perhaps, just simply stating they are “fine”, have no symptoms, and do not believe they need to see a healthcare provider. The truth is, that our bodies are marvelous pieces of machinery. They are filled with all kinds of built in mechanisms that heal, repair and even compensate for problems as they develop in a way that is better, and more sophisticated than anything man can currently match. But that also means that there are countless ways that things can go wrong. Some problems may present quickly and land you in the hospital. Others, have symptoms that develop over the course of years or even decades. Think about a large hydroelectric dam. As an outside observer the only times you may ever know something was wrong was if the power went out or the dam broke and flooded the town. But engineers and maintenance crews are constantly observing it, maintaining the machinery, looking for cracks and patching small problems before they become serious. Your healthcare provider is like these maintenance crews, when you’re healthy we are actively looking for the small things that can turn into big things down the line. A great example of all this is something like hypertension (increased blood pressure). In a majority of patients, they have no symptoms. They do not feel unwell, there is typically no pain, there’s no nausea or other symptomatic complaints. Unless it was bad enough to cause a headache or palpitations, most patients would never know they had hypertension and only find out after a visit to the doctor. So what’s the problem? The problem is hypertension is like the small crack in the dam, it’s a silent killer eating away at the foundations of your health. The consequences for untreated hypertension can be, in a word.. severe. First, the heart has to beat just a little bit harder to continue to pump effectively. Every second, of every day, without rest, up to 100,000 times per day it has to work harder to keep you alive. Not necessarily an issue at first but like all things the heart begins to stress and fatigue with excessive workload. Over the course of months and years this stress can take its toll until the heart begins to fail. Additionally, while elevated blood pressure is not a huge deal to the major vessels in the body, some vessels in the body are small.. Like really small… and fragile. There are microscopic vessels in your body which can, and are, damaged little by little by increased blood pressure. For these fragile vessels, it doesn’t take much for them to rupture and break. These particular vessels are commonly found in two places, the retina of the eyes and the kidneys. So what do you think is among the most common presentations of hypertension? If you guessed vision loss and kidney failure than you would be correct! Unfortunately, kidney failure is also a silent killer. Symptoms of kidney failure are basically fatigue and a general feeling of unwell known as Malaise. But this doesn’t happen over night. Just like everything else the body compensates and symptoms do not appear until the end stages. Kidney failure has 5 major stages and most patients will never feel a single symptom until stage 4 or 5. By the time patients go to see a doctor because they are feeling unwell, it may be irreversible.
There are countless other conditions and disorders that we screen for on a regular basis because of their clandestine nature: thyroid problems, blood problems, kidney, liver, cancers, diabetes, hiv, hepatitis… and the list goes on and on. None of these will typically present overnight as some kind of catastrophic illness, instead they take time to develop. These are the kinds of things we check for on a routine basis even when patients are well. I have already lost track of how many patients have come in to see me for a physical thinking everything was fine and they were wasting their time, only to discover a major oversight in their health. In a handful of occasions we even caught cancer in the early stages before it had progressed and while it was still treatable.
The moral of the story is that feeling “fine” is not a reliable way to tell if you are healthy, the fact that you haven’t seen a doctor is not a reliable indicator of how healthy you are either and nor are they an accurate prediction of how long you will remain that way. It simply means that you have not had any symptoms that are “bad enough” to warrant a visit to your doctor. The reason that providers ask you about your medical history, your family history, if you smoke, if you drink, or any other of a multitude of different behaviors is because they can influence the many different things you may be at risk for and can alter our approach in how we treat you. For example, if a patient came to me with a family history where her mother and father both had heart attacks in their 50’s, then I would be making sure this patient got an EKG and was eating healthy, exercising and maybe even received an ultrasound of their heart in their 40’s, to make sure nothing is developing. This is what preventative medicine can look like, if I started to catch anomalies early we can address them before they reach the stages of a full blown heart attack.
As you can imagine, preventative medicine is often considered to be an unnecessary expense, and that’s because when you are in the traditional healthcare system these tests and diagnostics can run into the thousands of dollars. When you step outside of the traditional system however, prevention strategies become much more affordable, and much more important in your care. With a Direct Primary Care practice, prevention is a key component of your care, we believe it’s important for us to check in with you and make sure everything is going well.
Jason Rogers, PA-C
Starlight Health is a small mobile Family Medicine practice located in Fort Collins, Colorado. We offer unlimited house calls, extended visit times between 30-90 minutes and the ability to directly call, email, text or video chat through telemedicine with your healthcare provider all for one low monthly fee. By contracting directly with our patients and not the insurance companies, we can offer steep discounts on labs, medications and various other services at near cost. We have affordable plans for individuals, families as well as employer groups. If you would like to learn more about our practice please go to www.starlighthealth.com
To learn more about Direct Primary Care in general please go to:
To find a Direct Primary Care practice near you please go to: