Meet Ashok, a South Mumbai-based entrepreneur who is 28 years old. His professional objective is to grow his fledgling company into a successful enterprise. He places more importance on his career than on his well-being. His workdays are filled with looming deadlines, demanding long hours spent in cramped areas using digital devices, and little time spent outdoors or engaging in physical activity.
His eating habits are unpredictable; he occasionally skips meals or consumes calorie-dense meals at odd times of the day. He occasionally drinks alcohol and also consumes energy drinks. His sleep-wake cycle has been disturbed by his schedule.Ashok gradually realizes that he is frequently thirsty. Also, he experiences general weariness. He dismisses it as a symptom of dehydration and keeps drinking lots of water. His thirst is still unquenched, though. He continues to feel exhausted.
Ashok is concerned. He chooses to undergo a health examination. He has prediabetes, according to the examination. Why didn’t I get a preventive health check earlier? is Ashok’s first question.
An assessment of one’s health status is possible through a preventive health check. Many chronic diseases can be brought on by, or act as a catalyst for, family history, genetics, personal history, stress (particularly deadline pressure and competitiveness), sedentary lifestyle, unpredictable and poor food habits, interrupted sleep-wake cycles, and environmental risks.
You may take charge of your health with proactive, routine, preventive testing by:
recognizing early warning signs and symptoms, estimating the likelihood that various latent chronic illness conditions will manifest, and putting into practice individualized care options
tracking the course of the illness and lowering the likelihood of complications (both from the disease and treatment)
minimizing your long-term treatment costs and decreasing morbidity and disability.
If Ashok didn’t take the step to go for a preventive health check, he would never have realized he was pre-diabetic. He would only learn about his condition after it had progressed to full-blown diabetes when interventional outcomes may have been delayed or not fruitful.
Timely and regular preventive health check is essential in detecting or identifying risk for infectious or non-infectious underlying disorders and targeting them before they progress. Combining preventative health screening evaluations with an active lifestyle, balanced and nutritious diet, substance abuse and alcoholism avoidance, sleep hygiene, and stress management puts the reins of control over our health in our own hands.
