Being sick is not something anyone looks forward to but unfortunately it is unavoidable. While maintaining a healthy diet, exercising regularly, resisting smoking and practicing safe sex are always recommended and definitely great ways to enhance your overall health and well-being, sometimes illnesses or even diseases can still find their way into your life. Here are a few more ways you should consider to make sure your health is up to par.
5. Perform Gender Specific Screening: Breast and/or testicular self-exams, pap smears, mammograms and bone density scans as well as prostate exams are excellent ways to detect diseases that target a particular gender such as Breast Cancer, Cervical Cancer, Prostate Cancer and Osteoporosis. Each specific screening looks for a different disease so it’s best to make sure you’re getting all that are recommended for your gender and age group.
4. Perform Colon Cancer Screening: Most people, female or male, should start getting screened for colon cancer after the age of 50. Colon cancer is considered the second leading cause of deaths in the United States. There are three ways to detect colon cancer; colonoscopy, fecal occult blood exam and sigmoidoscopy. Your health care provider can tell you which of these methods would be best for you and how often you should have it done for best results.
3. Perform Diabetes Screening: Diabetes, when not properly controlled can lead to blindness, kidney disease, the need for limb amputation as well as many other health issues. The disease can affect all age groups and genders. With almost 9 percent of all Americans (27 percent of Americans 65 and older) having been diagnosed with Diabetes, the screening for any form of Diabetes is very important.
2. Perform Blood Pressure and Cholesterol Screening: Heart attacks, strokes, eye and kidney problems are just a few things that can be cause by high blood pressure. If your blood pressure is between 120/80 and 139/89, your physician may request you get screened more often.
High cholesterol is one of the main risk factors of heart disease, the United States’ number one cause of death. Physicians recommend you start getting your cholesterol screened at the age of 20 with the frequency of testing increasing as you get older.
1. Perform Immunizations: Vaccines are the front line defense against many diseases and we begin getting them as soon as we’re born. Measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio and many other diseases are prevented by immunizations before we even start school. As adults, some of the most common immunizations include Flu and pneumonia shots and the Shingles vaccine.
Most diseases are easily maintained or cured when detected early. When combined with an overall healthy lifestyle, these preventive measures will help you stay vigorous. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed, most preventive care procedures including screenings and immunizations are now offered at no cost to you. Ask your doctor how often each test or immunization is necessary based off of your family and personal health history.
