What is the difference and connection between preventive health care and physical examination

To put it simply, physical examination is a very core implementation link in the preventive health care system. The two belong to the relationship between "partial technical means" and "full-cycle system engineering". They have both connections and clear functional boundaries.

In the past two months, I met retired Aunt Zhang when I was working in the preventive health department of the community health service center. She came with a physical examination report that had been normal for three consecutive years. She said that she always felt heavy and could not sleep well, and she always wondered, "I have a good physical examination every year, but why am I still feeling uncomfortable?" In fact, she equated physical examination with preventive health care - if you think about it, physical examination is more like taking a high-definition "static snapshot" of the body. All items have clear medical thresholds, such as whether there is high blood pressure, whether there are nodules, and whether tumor markers are high. What is checked are "disease signals that have appeared abnormal but have not yet developed into symptoms." The goal is very clear, which is to find problems. But the scope of preventive health care is much wider, and it follows the logic of health management throughout a person's life: getting vaccinated when you are born is preventive health care, having your eyesight checked and doing scoliosis intervention when you are in school is preventive health care, office workers adjusting their daily routine and controlling uric acid is preventive health care, and making aging-friendly modifications to your home to prevent falls when you are in your 70s or 80s is also preventive health care. The core is not only to find problems, but also to nip them before they arise. Even if there are no abnormal indicators, we must help you adjust your condition to the best. At that time, I did a simple assessment of Aunt Zhang’s living habits and found that she would hold her tablet and watch TV dramas until 11 o’clock every day after square dancing. She also liked to eat pickled radishes for dinner. I adjusted the intensity of aerobics for her, taught her 5 minutes of cervical spine relaxation exercises before going to bed, and asked her to replace the pickled vegetables for dinner with cold vegetables. When she came back less than a month later, she said she slept much better and her shoulders and neck were no longer stiff. These adjustments are actually in the category of preventive health care, but you cannot detect these problems through routine physical examinations.

But then again, if preventive care is not supported by physical examination, it can easily become "blind maintenance" without direction. Just like if you want to perform maintenance on your old house, you must first use instruments to check whether there are hollows in the wall and whether there are leaks in the water pipes. You can't just paint and replace the pipes, right? I have met many people who follow the trend of taking liver-protecting tablets and drinking various health-preserving teas. As a result, the transaminase was already high during the physical examination last year. If this indicator had been obtained early, adjusting the diet and drinking less alcohol would be more effective than taking more health supplements. This is the value of physical examination - it provides objective numerical basis for preventive health care, can help you accurately find the direction to adjust, and will not make useless efforts.

There are indeed two extreme views in the industry. One is that "physical examinations are useless", saying that problems found cannot be cured, and it is better to exercise more. In essence, physical examinations and preventive health care are separated. Early lung cancer and cervical cancer detected by early screening can have a cure rate of more than 90%. If you wait until symptoms are present before going for examination, the cost and prognosis will not be worse. Another one is "physical examination first". Every year, tens of thousands of dollars are spent on high-end screening of the whole body. After the examination is completed, the report is stuffed in the drawer, and then the patient stays up late and drinks. This is to equate physical examination with preventive care. If the abnormalities detected are not intervened, and bad living habits are not changed, no matter how frequent physical examinations are, it will be useless.

In fact, to use an inappropriate analogy, a physical examination is like the heart rate and vital capacity measured before each long-distance run. It can tell you whether your current body can withstand the intensity of the next exercise. Preventive health care is your long-term process of controlling running volume, adjusting running posture, and regular work and rest. Only by combining the two can you run farther, more steadily, and avoid injuries.