No matter what stage of your life you are at, having your annual wellness visit is incredibly important when it comes to keeping a close eye on your ongoing health. You can quickly identify any potentially threatening illnesses before they worsen, whilst also keeping your mind at bay, specifically any anxiety you may have around potential illnesses. This article will discuss in more detail some of the top reasons as to why going for a wellness visit at least once a year is crucial to your health and the benefits of making a habit out of doing so.
Having Trouble Scheduling an Annual Wellness Visit?
While these visits are incredibly important, it can be difficult getting one arranged due to the fact they are not often a doctor’s primary concern, especially not recently, as thanks to the pandemic, surgeries all over the country have struggled to keep up with the increased demand for care. If you have been finding that upon speaking to your doctors they have been struggling to find time for your wellness visit, you should enquire about utilizing the services of an organization such as ChartSpan, who make it so that conducting an Annual Wellness Visit for Medicare patients has never been easier. They are more than open to working with other carers as a means to getting the best possible outcome for patients.
An AWV Allows You to Assess Your Overall Health
The first reason why having an AWV is important is because it allows you to have somebody take the time to properly assess your overall health. Everyone will have risk factors, such as their age, lifestyle, and family history, so a checkup will allow a professional to consider your health in light of these and suggest further action (if any is needed). They will check:
- Your Blood Pressure – which will measure the force of your blood against your arteries. Blood pressure usually increases with age so lifestyle changes may be necessary to bring it back down to normal (normal in this case being a reading lower than 120/80).
- Your Cholesterol – This will involve taking a measurement of the amount of cholesterol that is found in your blood. In a healthy patient where the cholesterol reading does not appear to be a risk factor, they will usually give off a reading of less than 200mg/dL.
- Blood Glucose Screening – These will be carried out to measure the amount of sugar present in your blood.
- Osteoporosis Screening – This is important especially with older patients as screening will be able to show any early signs of osteoporosis. This kind of check is usually recommended for women who are 65 or older and men who are 70 or older. If there are potentially other risk factors at play, then screenings would likely be carried out earlier than this.
- Body Mass Index – This will be calculated by taking into account height and weight to work out if the patient is a healthy weight. This is an important check as overweight patients are more at risk of heart disease and other serious illnesses.
You Will Be Able to Update Your Vaccinations
Their importance has always been known but this past year more than any other has highlighted just how important staying up to date with vaccines is. Adults need to ensure they have topped up their vaccines to prevent contracting dangerous diseases. At these annual check-ups, your doctor will review your vaccination history and risk factors before making a decision whether or not you need any more. Some of the vaccines that will likely need topping up are:
- Covid-19 Vaccine – This is incredibly useful when it comes to preventing people from getting seriously ill from covid-19 and as such, it is recommended that everybody aged 12 and over gets it.
- Flu Vaccine – Similarly to the covid jab, this is incredibly beneficial when it comes to people not getting seriously ill if they are unlucky enough to contract the flu.
- HPV Vaccine – This protects against different cancers caused by the human papillomavirus.
- Pneumonia Vaccine – If you have asthma, are a smoker, or are older than 65, then you may well have it recommended to you that you should get a pneumonia vaccine as a means to prevent any kind of lung infection.
Screening For Cancer
Keeping up with your routine cancer screenings is very important and these can be done at your Annual Wellness Visits. These are naturally very important as a lot of cancers do not make themselves known until very late on in development, so having regular check-ups is a good idea. If you do get cancer, the earlier it is found, the more effective the treatment can be.
Your doctor will take into account your age and any other risk factors when screening for cancer and factor them into a normal physical exam. Here, they will check for the likes of skin cancer, breast cancer, gynecological cancer, cervical cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, and lung cancer.
Conclusion
It is very important that as an individual you are going for your annual wellness visit and as a carer, you are encouraging patients to go for their annual wellness visit. If these are harder to organize, you should consider contacting a healthcare organization that will be able to help.
An annual wellness visit comes with many benefits but generally speaking, they are effective for keeping on top of your health. You will be able to have a lot of different tests done to ensure factors such as your blood pressure and cholesterol levels aren’t too high. You will also be able to stay up to date on your vaccines and have some screenings for cancer. These are all very useful as even though you may not feel like anything is wrong, there can still be underlying problems with your body and these examinations do a great job of picking out those potential problems.
