Preventive Medicine

Preventative medicine is the discipline of assessing your general health before you get sick, and offer advice/counseling, screening exams and vaccines to best help you be healthy and not get ill. It is an often overlooked but highly important part of self-care.

Preventative medicine visits, or better known as general physicals, are age-specific assessment of risk from physical, behavioral, environmental and genetic factors. The family medicine physicians is best equipped to bring together these risk factors by assessing your personal medical history, your family’s medical history, work and environmental conditions, nutrition, sleep patterns, emotional health and physical activity, to mention a few. This assessment provides you with the knowledge of things that you are doing right for your health as well as those factors that may be of potential detriment.

Preventative Medicine visits (general physicals) include:

• Personal medical history
• Family medical history
• Vaccine history (MMR, Chickenpox, Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis A/B, HPV)
• Physical activity, work/school environment, nutrition, sleep, sexual history assessment
• Previous psychiatric/mental health conditions
• Height/Weight/BMI (Body Mass Index)/Blood Pressure/Pulse
• Complete and comprehensive physical exam
• Counseling on any risk factors, including nutrition, safe sex, contraception, exercise, stress management
• Age-specific screening for cancers (colon, cervical, prostate, breast)
• STD (sexually transmitted disease) screening (HIV, Syphilis, Hepatitis B, Gonorrhea and Chlamydia, etc.)