Check-up – why should a healthy person undergo an examination? check-up – a new name for regular medical examination?
Check-up (“check-up”) is a set of examinations, which, by design, should identify diseases at an early stage in order to reduce mortality from non-communicable diseases: primarily from cancer and diseases of the cardiovascular system. It is also necessary in order to identify whether all the necessary drugs, such as antacids, are in your home medicine cabinet.
Isn’t that the same as a dispensary? In fact, these concepts are almost synonymous, but medical examination is aimed at the entire population, and this is a program that is paid for by the state, which means it has a number of disadvantages associated with it.
Clinical examination is a certain concept of treatment and prevention activities deployed for the entire population of the country. It is usually carried out in clinics. The task assigned to a medical examination is understandable and correct – maintaining the health of the population and identifying problems requiring treatment. Here are the main problems:
The task of maintaining the health of the population does not always satisfy the needs of a particular person, and also forces him to follow a program that was drawn up “for everyone”.
These programs become obsolete rather quickly, and updating them nationwide is not an easy task.
Not all countries have implemented a cancer screening program that can control a number of cancers, reducing mortality from them in the population. It is depressing to see the success of, for example, the Scandinavian countries, where a successful cervical cancer screening program, which began in the 1960s, made it possible to make this disease “rare”.
Another problem is that polyclinics do not always have the necessary equipment, although this has recently become a little better.
You also need to take into account the inertia of the system, where everything is rather inconvenient and causes some rejection among a large number of the working population. Meanwhile, this gives rise to the problem of low accessibility to doctors and, as a result, the growth of severe and neglected forms of diseases.
All this does not mean that a medical examination is not needed, but it needs significant changes. What to do?
A qualitatively different alternative is the check-up. It is a more modern and patient-focused product, incorporating state-of-the-art diagnostic methods. Check-ups are carried out mainly on the basis of commercial clinics, and the patient himself pays for them. This ensures the plasticity of these programs and the possibility of changing them for each specific person.
But there are pitfalls here too. As a rule, check-ups offered by private clinics can be redundant, and in pursuit of the assortment, clinics create a variety of programs, for example, oncology, cardio, gastro, for women, for men, for those who want to become parents, etc. They are aimed at one area and cannot provide their main function – the identification of the early stages of serious diseases or factors predisposing to them.
The task of such an “examination” is to make money not only on meaningless examinations but also, most likely, the treatment of non-existent diseases.
Over the past years, we have been closely involved in cancer prevention and the creation of examination programs, studying not only Western counterparts but also the fundamental scientific component that underlies each study.
Here is a list of meaningless methods of primary diagnosis.
- Tumour markers. There is no universal tumour biomarker that can be found in any type of cancer, tumor markers are nonspecific – they can increase in the absence of a tumour and may be normal in the presence of cancer, and therefore tumour markers are never used for primary diagnosis. Their main application is clarifying diagnostics and monitoring of ongoing therapy, as well as, in some cases, monitoring after treatment. The presence of tumour markers in the check-up is a bad sign.
- Whole body MRI. Unlike the science-based Whole Body Diffuse MRI (WBDWI) study, which is indicated and evidence-based, we are talking about Whole Body MRI, essentially the sum of individual MRI exams of different parts of the body, which is often offered within the check-up. This study, for a number of technical reasons, cannot be qualitatively completed in an hour and a half.
MRI is a complex and expensive imaging modality that is very wasteful in screening healthy populations. It cannot detect the majority of oncological diseases in this mode, and its main goal in this regard is to find and treat you with cancer. - A whole series of insignificant phenomena and conditions that do not require any impact.
- For the reason described above, it is also not necessary to perform a full-body CT and PET-CT as part of a check-up without indications.
- Ultrasound of the abdominal cavity and retroperitoneal space, sadly, despite its relative safety, without any reason, does not have any diagnostic value
- Endoscopic examinations without reasons for persons under 45 – 50 years of age. You are young, full of energy and nothing bothers you – forget about it. There are no data indicating the need for screening gastroscopy and colonoscopy at a young age;