Why should I have preventive screenings if I don't have health problems?
By controlling risk factors and having preventive screening tests early, before symptoms appear, diseases can be caught earlier and treated more effectively. Watch family physician Gretchen Phillips, MD, discuss why preventive screenings are key.
Transcript
One of the greatest breakthroughs of modern medicine is that we have found what kind of risk factors people have that lead
to different diseases. [MUSIC PLAYING]
For example, being female puts all women at risk for breast cancer. There's a small risk in men, but that's
one of the more basic ones. Diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure, those are all risk factors for heart disease.
By controlling those risk factors and having preventive screening tests early on, before there
are any symptoms, we can stop someone from having an advanced cancer.
An example I like to use is with colonoscopy. These are recommended for everyone over the age of 50,
unless there's a family history of colon cancer. And the beautiful part about a colonoscopy
is even though the prep is a little uncomfortable, they give you some medication to go to sleep. And if they find a polyp that may be cancerous and take
that polyp out, you were just cured of cancer, and it may have been one that could have shortened your life,
just with a simple procedure. That's one of the more dramatic examples. For mammograms, having mammograms on a regular basis,
we can find early breast cancers. It's important to find breast cancers and other cancers early because the earlier
we find them, the more treatable they are. By the time those cancer cells get into the lymph nodes and into the other organs of the body,
sometimes it's too late to make a difference, not only in the disease, but also in how it can shorten the life span of someone who
ends up with that cancer. So even if you feel great, please talk to your doctor about the recommended screening exams for your gender, family
history, risk factors, and age and have those preventive screening tests so we can potentially
health screening
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