MOTIVATION FOR MEDICAL PREVENTION / HEALTH CHECK-UP - WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES HEALTHY PEOPLE WANT TO UNDERGO A HEALTH CHECK?
"Pure Prevention" is an Exception
Preventive measures and symptom-oriented diagnostics are almost always combined
What motivates a person to visit a doctor and get a medical exam? Usually it is persisting physical or mental discomfort that makes one dive into the world wide web and look for the best treatment, ideally on a self-help basis. One, of course, also hopes that the body will heal itself, perhaps with a little support from traditional home remedies. However, if the problem persists, going to the doctor is unavoidable. People finally want clarity and, of course, remedy.
In addition to this classic "repair medicine" approach based on targeted diagnostics and therapy, preventive care has become the second major pillar of medicine in recent years. Here, people already go to the doctor when still healthy, so that risk factors and even diseases can be discovered in a stage in which they have not caused symptoms yet and are still completely curable, either by optimizing one's lifestyle or by gentle therapeutic interventions. The early detection and removal of polyps by preventive colonoscopy is an example of such a measure.
But is there such a thing as a purely preventive medical check-up? "Even if people are becoming more and more aware of the preventive idea, they often need an additional reason to actually decide to undergo a complete medical examination", says Prof. Bamberger, the Director of the Medical Prevention Center in Hamburg, Germany, who has performed more than 10.000 whole body check ups over the last years. For example, diseases in friends or relatives of the same age may make a person think: "What if I..." Another reason to undergo a medical check up is indeed the feeling of not being so fit and so strong as one used to be in the past. One may feel tired or even a little depressed, suffer from chronic pain, and, therefore, want to get "head to toe" check-up to exclude a serious disease.
In this situation, one obviously looks for centers offering comprehensive and high-quality diagnostic services. Specialized prevention centers offer several advantages compared to the classic hospital environment. They are more service-oriented, the healthy "client" does not feel stigmatized as a "patient" by smells, emergencies etc., and the doctors are much more experienced with regard to preventive diagnostics, i.e. they know best when to act on a finding, when to wait and watch, and how to improve the client's risk profile. Such centers are usually located in metropolitan areas all over Europe.
To learn more about Conradia, please visit their profiles:
CONRADIA Medical Prevention - Hamburg
CONRADIA Medical Prevention – Munich
Professor Dr. med. Christoph M. Bamberger is a specialist for Internal Medicine and Sub-specialist in Endocrinology. The internist and hormone expert has become well-known as the holder of the first and only professorship for “Endocrinology and Metabolism of Aging” in Germany. He is one of the most renowned physicians within the field of preventive medicine
