Our Belief on Lab Work, Quarterly Visits and Education

What is the key to a healthy life? Making choices that promote the care of your body and prevent disease and illness from impacting your life.

We call this preventative care and it is the cornerstone of how we serve our patients.

A healthy life really can be as simple as preventing disease and illness before it ever becomes an issue. When you eat healthy, exercise regularly, visit your physician and most importantly follow their recommendations, you are setting yourself up for a healthy life.

There will be situations, however, where a patient may be predisposed to certain illnesses simply because of family history or past choices. You may be doing everything right, living a healthy lifestyle, and still be a candidate for diabetes, hyperlipidemia or another chronic illness. At that point, preventative care evolves from preventing a disease altogether to preventing a disease from getting out of control – if you do your part.

What does it mean to do your part? It means visiting your doctor or healthcare provider on a quarterly basis for your wellness exams.

What Does a Quarterly Visit and Wellness Exam Look Like?

At Warner Family Practice, your healthcare provider will prescribe important lab work that allows an analysis to be conducted of your current health and for recommendations to prevent or curb any illness or developing disease. This lab work will allow us to catch any illness or disease early on. If something is caught, we immediately begin discussing treatment options.

Preventative health care is the cornerstone of our practice, leading us to try and catch any sign of disease early on – the highest level of prevention is only available through lab work. Signs of chronic illness such as diabetes, hyperlipidemia (high cholesterol, triglycerides) and hypertension will show up in their earliest stages through lab work results.

One conversation we often have is answering the concerns of patients wondering why our physicians place lab work orders which are wider in scope than other physicians. Simply put, because we know the more comprehensive and thorough we are when there aren’t problems will allow us to notice even the slightest variance in health when there may be a problem.

At your quarterly visit, if you are taking any medication, your physician will make sure your medication is working and that your body is responding to it. This will also be a chance for you to ask any questions, and for your physician to decide if medication changes need to be made.

I’m Healthy, Why Do I Need To Be Seen Quarterly?

Healthy today does not guarantee that you will be exempt from developing an illness or disease in the future. At the very least, every patient is at risk for many conditions which run in the family. The younger a patient is the more bulletproof he or she may feel, and most will assume that they don’t need to worry about their health if they are under a certain age; this thinking is a fallacy. Age may protect against some conditions but it is just as important for young people to continue being seen quarterly to preserve their good health and watch for signs for something as simple as elevated cholesterol numbers.

With the trends in overall societal health giving way to more and more people being diagnosed with a chronic illness such as Type 2 Diabetes – even children – we continue to use quarterly visits and aggressive testing to ensure that everything is done to watch for signs of illness before anything must be done to treat illness.

Every American, even the pro athlete, benefits from preventative care and frequent visits with their physician.

Do I Really Need to Be Seen Every Quarter?

In today’s culture, individuals keep busy schedules, and four visits a year to a family practice facility may seem like a lot – especially when you grew up accustomed to seeing your doctor once a year and when you were sick. Our patients have come to appreciate the frequent nature of our approach to care. Through all of our work and studies we have found that quarterly visits allow us to see how a patient’s body works during all four seasons of the year.

Some patients choose to schedule a minimum of one office visit per year – once a year is certainly better than nothing – and it is often these patients who will need to start out with more aggressive treatments when a condition does develop. Our quarterly patients can often improve developing conditions with lifestyle changes prior to needing many costly prescriptions or radical treatments/therapies.

Follow Your Physician’s Instructions

Arriving and following through with your scheduled quarterly visits is a huge win for you – and for our physicians. However, there is another battle to fight – adopting recommendations as lifestyle changes.

As a patient, it is important to keep your appointments and follow through with the physician’s recommendations. If you have an appointment with your healthcare provider, the best thing you can do for your health is to keep that appointment. If you and your physician agree on a path of treatment, stay on the straight and narrow.

Follow through can be hard but it is all in the spirit of caring for your body now to ensure every possibility of maintaining an optimum quality of life throughout your life.

You Can Have A Healthy Life

At Warner Family Practice, we want you to have a healthy life. Your health is important to us and it should be important to you, too. It all starts by doing your part to put your health first.

Visit your physician on a quarterly basis, get the lab work done and follow your physician’s recommendations. If you have any questions, ask your physician during your visit. Keep yourself educated on any illness or disease that you may have. When you do all this, truly practicing preventative care, you can live the healthy life you want and that we want for you, as well.