What is the relationship between preventive care and physical examination?

Simply put, physical examination is the front-end "reconnaissance post" of the preventive health care system and the core basis for formulating all preventive health care measures. Preventive health care is an extension of the value of physical examination. The two are mutually supportive and progressive. Without any link, the goal of early prevention and early treatment will not be achieved.

I have been working in community public health for almost 6 years and have seen too many extreme examples. Last spring, I gave free annual physical examinations to people over 60 years old in the community. Aunt Zhang was found to have high-risk HPV16. At that time, she clutched the report and her face turned pale. She said that she rarely even has gynecological inflammation. If it were not for the free physical examination, she would not have thought of checking this. Later, we combined her physical examination report and daily routine to give her an exclusive health care plan. She did not need to take supplements blindly, but adjusted her routine to stay up less late, eat more high-protein foods, and cooperated with the intervention drugs prescribed by the doctor. She would be followed up every three months. When she was reexamined at the end of the year, she had already turned negative. You said that if she only had a physical examination without follow-up health care, or if she bought various health products every day but never refused to do a physical examination, how could we have such a result?

Nowadays, the opinions on the Internet about these two are quite polarized. One group says that "physical examinations are all about IQ, and problems found cannot be cured. It is better to soak your feet more often and take health supplements." The other group thinks that "I do a full physical examination every year, and there is definitely no problem with my body. There is no need to engage in preventive health care." In fact, both of these ideas are quite delaying things.

Two months ago, a 28-year-old young man came to me and said that he had a gout attack last week and was in so much pain that he couldn't get out of bed. He dug out last year's workplace physical examination report and saw that the column for uric acid had a rising arrow, which was only 20 points away from the upper limit of the reference value. The report also recommended a low-purine drink. Eat less, stay up late and drink less sweet drinks. At that time, he saw that all the indicators did not exceed the "red line", so he felt that there was nothing wrong with his body. He still stayed up late every day to catch up on projects, drank cold beer with friends after get off work, and did not make targeted dietary adjustments or other health care interventions, so it suddenly happened.

To put it bluntly, you can treat your body like a car that you drive every day. A physical examination is a regular inspection of the whole car, which can detect minor hidden dangers in advance. Preventive care is subsequent repairs and maintenance. You can't just do maintenance and never check for faults, nor can you continue to drive without replacing the brake pads after checking them, right? If we really want to move the focus of disease prevention forward, neither of these two will work.