What Are The Actual Benefits Of An Annual Health Checkup?

People often wonder whether the annual health checkup is actually worthwhile. In other words, they want to know whether there is any real justification for spending time (and perhaps money) on the annual health checkup. After all, going for a checkup takes some effort. Even if the checkup is at a walk in clinic at Harley Street, getting there nonetheless requires some self-exertion. And as humans, we are naturally wired to only put effort into activities that are truly beneficial to us. Therefore if people are to be motivated to go for annual health checkups, they need to have the proper insight into the checkups’ benefits. Those benefits are the focus of this article.

Now to understand the actual benefits of annual health checkups, we need to appreciate several facts. Firstly, we need to appreciate that prevention is always much better than cure. Secondly, we need to learn how annual health checkups can help us by giving us holistic views of our state of health. And thirdly, we need to understand how knowledge gained in the annual health checkups can be empowering to us. Let’s look at each of those aspects in turn.

Prevention is always better than cure

The annual health checkup is within the broader domain of preventive healthcare. So this always stands in contrast to ‘curative healthcare’. In practical terms, preventive healthcare is always way better than curative healthcare. If you wait until you have problems that require ‘curing’ then it may be too late in some cases.

Going for an annual health checkup can be likened to taking your car for a yearly MOT. The idea behind the annual health checkup is to catch issues before they balloon up and become hard (or impossible) to treat.

Usually, when you go to the hospital on account of an illness, all focus is on that particular issue. Therefore if you only ever go to the hospital when unwell, a problem may arise. That is because your healthcare providers may never really get insight into your general state of health. What can give the doctors a real insight into your general well-being is the annual health checkup. That is because, in this checkup, the focus is not turned on a particular health problem: but on the general state of health.

Some of the specific issues that an annual health checkup may catch in time include:

• Emerging cardiovascular risks (including blood pressure or cholesterol related problems)
• Immunity system dysfunctions that may be coming up
• Degenerative diseases that may be starting to take root (an example being diabetes)
• Lumps (for instance in the breast or testicles) which may turn out to be malignant
• Nutritional deficiencies. (That is for instance on vitamin D, which can have other major broader health implications)

It is worth noting that these are issues that would otherwise have been missed. Possibly until they caused major complications. But the annual health checkup enables us to take note of them in good time, and perhaps resolve them before they get too troublesome.

How the annual checkup helps in gaining a holistic view of the state of health

In the annual health checkup, the focus is not just on your physical health. Your mental well-being is also looked into. And the importance of this becomes clear once you appreciate the body-mind connection. Simply put, being mentally or emotionally unwell can predispose you to a wide array of (serious) health problems.

Take for instance something as ‘simple’ as stress. There is ample evidence to show the connection between chronic stress and things like blood sugar levels and cancers. Now if the annual checkup reveals that you seem to have too high levels of stress, you may be given advice on how to better manage it. This may look like a simple affair. But in the long run, it can end up lowering your proneness to major problems like diabetes and cancer.

Similarly, in the course of the annual health checkup, you may be advised on matters to do with work-life balance. These can end up having a huge positive impact on all other aspects of your mental and physical well-being.

Granted, much of the advice you may be given during the annual checkup may appear common. It may be the stuff you keep on coming across in health articles online and elsewhere. It may also be stuff you have been hearing all your life.

But when the same advice is given to you by a doctor following a health checkup, it acquires more authority. You find that you are now more likely to adhere to it, rather than just knowing it mentally. And actually putting this advice into practice increases the chances of you ending up with better health outcomes, in the long run.

How the knowledge gained during the annual health checkup can lead to self-empowerment and change

The annual checkup gives us a real insight into what is happening within our bodies. Such knowledge is obviously very empowering. It may help us stop taking certain things for granted. And it may push us into effecting certain necessary changes in our lives.

The change that we effect due to the knowledge gained during the annual health checkup may be with regard to eating habits. For instance, we may shift from consuming lots of foods that are known to cause inflammation. The necessary change may also be in terms of taking our gut health more seriously. Or it may be in terms of adopting better/moderate exercise regimes.

In the end, this knowledge (and the changes we affect because of it) can help in avoiding serious diseases. Those would include the likes of:

• Strokes (which can be completely debilitating, if not fatal)
• Heart disease
• Diabetes (which can lead to a wide array of serious complications in various body systems)
• Cancers

Some of the things you learn during an annual health checkup are facts you’d otherwise have remained fully ignorant of. And mark you these are not some abstract things, but rather facts regarding your personal state of health. If you ignore annual health checkups, you won’t have any objective way of knowing your real general state of health. And nothing could be more disempowering than that.

Remember, the best time to visit a doctor is when you are feeling well. That is for preventive healthcare, as in the case of annual health checkups. It is better than waiting for things to go wrong with your health, falling unwell, then try scrambling for a cure that may be elusive.

Are you seeking a walk in clinic at Harley Street that performs annual health checkups? Our London GP Clinic does offer this service.