Should You Skip Your Doctor Visit?

Would you believe there're instructions on internet on how to deal with elderly parents who refuse medical care? Personally, I'm not very optimistic about that issue. You can carefully follow each point given in an article, and the result is still zero. Our parents are very inventive when it comes to making up reasons why exactly they'll miss their checkup.

I want to believe our generation is different. While our parents still don't consider depression to be a true illness, we nearly take plastic surgery as one of those must-have basics. I think a preventive visit to your doctor (it's when you're not ill at the moment) is – or at least should be – also one of those basics.

Health benefits of regular checkups are obvious as it might, in some cases, catch something small before it turns serious, i.e. find a disease in an early stage. That's why I want to talk more about those 'non-health' benefits. In addition, the research conducted in Denmark few years ago, for example, showed that regular checkups had no effect on preventing cardiovascular disease or death.

In my health picture, a preventive doctor appointment is one of those moments of peace in the boiling ocean of life. It might sound ridiculous, but I don't go to doctors to only check on my health. I go there to change the habitual environment, to educate myself on what's going on in my body, and to also check off in my personal health plan. (If there's something like a personal financial plan, why don't we all have a personal health plan?). I do it more for my mental health to have the feeling that I'm not giving up on my life.

As each of us, I'm also busy and (let's be honest) often pretty lazy to make that call to schedule an appointment. However, at those moments of weakness I always remind myself how good I feel every time after I go there. I feel that my health schedule is packed, and that it was a good investment of time.

When it comes to aesthetic medicine, such as plastic surgery, weight loss or wellness procedures, I believe we should use every single chance in our life to look and feel better. When you look good, your self-esteem is growing, and you have more chances to be happy than when you're, for example, overweight. It's been estimated that self-care will 'steal' up to six years from our aging process!

The concept of the annual physical was first proposed by the American Medical Association in 1922. It later evolved, and now in the Czech Republic and most developed countries around the world, preventive visits are normally covered by insurance companies.

There're many things connected to our health that we can't plan for such as car accidents, loss of consciousness, or an emergency room visit... However, there's also a host of things we can affect such as our weight, our mood, our skin condition, even our fertility which is hugely affected by our lifestyle. Let's start affecting our overall well-being in a positive way by just making that simple call... Today!