Is there B-ultrasound for routine physical examination?

Most routine physical examination packages for ordinary healthy people will include basic B-ultrasound items, but there is no unified mandatory standard for whether it is equipped and which examination parts are covered. It all depends on the positioning of the package.

I ran into a trap last week when I helped my cousin who had just graduated to get a physical examination for her job. The basic entry package of 99 yuan didn’t even include a B-ultrasound. In the end, it cost 80 yuan to supplement the abdominal B-ultrasound. The 399 yuan routine physical examination package our company orders for employees every year not only includes abdominal B-ultrasounds, but also breast/prostate B-ultrasounds by gender, and even B-ultrasounds for thyroid-related screenings, which have been highly popular in recent years.

I was chatting with a senior nurse at the physical examination center before, and she also said that there are currently two different views in the industry on whether B-ultrasound should be standard for routine physical examinations. Some people think that routine B-ultrasound is not cost-effective for young people in their early 20s with no underlying diseases. Most of the findings are problems such as fatty liver and small cysts that do not require special intervention. It is better to put the budget into more universal items such as oral examination and Helicobacter pylori testing.； However, more clinicians still tend to include B-ultrasound in routine physical examinations. After all, it has no ionizing radiation, produces results quickly, and is low-cost. It is equivalent to taking a harmless "high-definition snapshot" of internal organs, and many early-stage problems without any symptoms can be discovered in advance. There is a 30-year-old male colleague next to me. He usually likes to stay up late and drink beer. He feels that he is in great health. Last year, during a routine physical examination, a B-ultrasound directly detected a 2-centimeter mass in the liver. Further tests revealed that it was a benign adenoma. He underwent minimally invasive surgery in time and everything was fine. If it had not been discovered for two or three years, there might have been a risk of malignant transformation.

If you are not sure whether the routine physical examination you choose includes B-ultrasound, just read two more pages of the item list before placing an order. Priority is given to those that include the abdomen and thyroid, which are the most cost-effective. For women, it is best to add breast and gynecological B-ultrasound, which is much more practical than many fancy premium items.