Healthy Living premiers tonight
It has been said that an apple a day can actually keep the doctor away, but when it comes to healthy practices, Belizeans, like the rest of the world, fall short. Tonight we premier a new weekly series which we hope will be the launch pad to get you on the path to Healthy Living … this week’s topic is about the medical check-up.
Marleni Cuellar, Reporting
Imagine it’s a Tuesday, three in the afternoon. Your chest begins to tightens, the tightness spreads to your left arm, moving to the left side of your neck. You begin to sweat even though you feel cold. You can no longer catch your breath. You are having a heart attack. You are thinking: “But I’m too young”. What you don’t realize is that your habits may have been propelling you towards this fate for some time.
Marleni Cuellar
“It is often said that prevention is better than cure and when it comes to our health, this old adage certainly applies. Prevention means knowing the status of your health and the things that make you more and less prone to developing common lifestyle diseases.”
Dr. Pedro Arriaga
“This is the real reason why we do medical evaluations because that will help us to prevent or to identify conditions that could be able to modify or to be able to be detected and that could be treated because some of them they could be treated and some of them they can’t.”
Dr. Pedro Arriaga is one of the primary care physicians at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. He specializes in adult internal medicine, specifically of the diagnosis and non-surgical treatment of diseases.
Dr Pedro Arriaga
“I can’t change your family, I can’t change your genes, but I could change the way how you eat and the way how you do physical activity, the smoking, all those things we can modify. Now, on the things you can’t change, we can’t change. But basically, if you have family history of hypertension, you have a family history of diabetes, I can do nothing about that, you understand. But if you have those risk factors, and you are not taking care of yourself and you are getting older and you’re getting heavier, you drink in excess or you’re not doing physical activity; all those factors they will make you think that the patient will have chances to, maybe not to stop the diseases to come, but at least to reduce the chance to have complications or more dangerous type of side effects due to disease.”
This is why doctors commonly recommend seeking regular check ups. Just how regular?
Dr. Pedro Arriaga
“The American Medical Association what they are recommending is if you have a patient have twenty years probably needs a check up maybe once every ten years. If you have a patient that is in between the thirties and forties then probably we recommend maybe twice or thrice, and if the patient is more than forty between forty and fifty definitely maybe every two to three years time to get a check up. If they have more than fifty years of age, every year. But again, this is just like a rule but in general yes it works. But you go to a specific type of patient they have similar conditions like we mentioned before like risk factors, family history and everything they’re probably although in their twenties and thirties and forties probably would need to do more medical evaluations more often than the regular patient.”
The Matron Roberts Health Clinic in Belize City is one of the public facilities which offer the medical examinations. Doreta Neal is the head nurse at the clinic.
Marleni Cuellar
“You have a lot of people coming in to get check ups?”
Nurse Doreta Neal
“I could say that the numbers have risen as of late because now people are becoming more aware of illnesses and their importance of getting check ups. I would say it’s still not as high as we’d want it we’d say out of a hundred percent maybe twenty-five percent of our patients coming in come in for check ups.”
“We make them comfortable and then we ask them some information so that we can complete a personal history and a health history and at that time we get any relevant information like if they had any illness before, their medical, surgical history and about family history so as to determine their risk factors or basically main areas that we need to look at. After that we take their vital signs which is the blood pressure, pulse, respiration and the temperature. We take note of that and then we take their weight and height to do the BMI which is the body mass index to determine if they’re underweight, overweight, obese or where they lie in that category. After that it is given to the doctor, the doctor sees them and order whatever relevant test that may be necessary to complete the check up which may be like lab test to include blood, urine, and stool and any x-rays; mostly chest x-rays to check the lung.”
But as Arriaga explains, a doctor’s responsibility to the patient extends beyond prescribing tests.
Dr. Pedro Arriaga
“In our nation that we have enough evidence that only one of five give patients come see a physician they will receive counseling on nutrition. Only one of seven patients come and see the physician they receive counseling in exercise. Only one in three patients where they are smokers receive counseling on stop cigarette. So all these things are actually important, if we want to modify those factors that are extremely important to prevent in the future what the patient could have. What we should be doing is trying to emphasize and try to spend more time with our patients doing counseling on the risk factors that could be able to changing them and that would make a difference.”
Marleni Cuellar
“Not everyone walks out of a check up with a bad report card, but be aware that knowing your health status is important so that you can recognize risk factors and reduce chances for developing preventable diseases. In the end, the only person directly responsible for your health is you.”
