Can routine physical examination be done in the afternoon

There is no absolute yes or no for this. It depends on whether the physical examination package you choose includes items that require fasting, and whether you can meet the prerequisites for the examination.

I have worked as a counselor in a public physical examination center for three years. The most common people I met were office workers who were unable to make it to the morning session. Either they had important meetings in the morning and couldn't leave, or they worked overtime the day before and slept past the appointment time. They called in a hurry to ask if they could reschedule to the afternoon. Last month, there was a young man working in operations who slept through the morning session scheduled by the unit. The items he checked happened to be only height and weight, chest X-ray, electrocardiogram, routine internal medicine and surgery, HPV and TCT screening. They were all items that did not require fasting. I asked him to come over at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The whole process was completed in less than 40 minutes, and the results were completely error-free.

However, if your package includes items such as liver function, blood lipids, fasting blood sugar, abdominal color ultrasound (especially those that need to see the gallbladder and pancreas), and carbon 13/14 breath test, then I really don’t recommend you spend the afternoon. The required fasting time for these projects is 8 to 12 hours. If you finish dinner at 6 o'clock the night before, you will have been fasting for almost 19 hours by 1 o'clock the next afternoon. Not to mention people with underlying diseases such as hypoglycemia and diabetes, even healthy young people will easily feel dizzy if they are hungry for such a long time. What's more important is that if you are hungry for too long, your body will automatically mobilize stored fat and glycogen, which will cause abnormalities in the results of blood lipids and blood sugar, making the test a white test. Take abdominal color ultrasound to look at the gallbladder, for example. When the stomach is empty, the gallbladder is full, like a small cloth bag filled with water. Even a polyp as big as a grain of millet can be clearly seen inside. If you eat, it will shrink into a small wrinkled ball, and even the smallest abnormalities can easily be missed.

Of course, some clinical nutrition doctors have mentioned that if you can accurately control the eating time, for example, eat a light breakfast without oil and sugar at 7 o'clock in the morning, then strictly fast and drink only a small amount of warm water, and fast for 8 hours at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you can actually do a fasting program in this situation. However, the threshold for this kind of operation is too high for ordinary people. Many people can't help but nibble a biscuit and drink a cup of milk tea. They only say that they have forgotten their dietary restrictions when they arrive at the scene. This trip is in vain and wastes time. Therefore, the fasting program of most physical examination centers is still only open until 12 o'clock in the morning. This is because they are afraid that people cannot control the fasting duration, and the test results will not be of much reference value, but will delay health judgments.

Nowadays, many physical examination centers have recognized the needs of office workers who do not have time to rush early, and have launched exclusive physical examination packages in the afternoon, which screen out all items that require fasting. It is suitable for people who only want to do basic screening and do not need digestive tract related examinations. If you call in advance and make an appointment, you don’t have to ask for leave and rush early.