Health Promotion & Screening

It may sound boring but feeling fitter feels wonderful and once incorporated into your life, is really no sweat (well, not much)! Body and mind are nourished together.

A scientific paper in the Lancet in 2018 stated , "The leading causes of ‘estimated years of life lost’ are commonly associated with lifestyle factors". We know smoking, alcohol, stress, obesity, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, lack of sleep all contribute to poor health outcomes and we can all make improvements in many of these areas.

Lifestyle medicine is a growing area due to concerns that we over-medicalise and over-complicate ideas about how to live healthily. We often feel good health is out of our hands but concentrating on the essentials and starting with small changes shows we can make significant improvements to our health. We can even reverse some chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

For good health we all need to consider SLEEP, EXERCISE, DIET, RELAXATION - referred to by many as 'The 4 Pillars'.

Though we rarely recommend any single commercial product, Dr Rangan Chaterjee, a GP, has written an excellent book (and audiobook and blogs), - 'The 4 Pillar Plan'. He simplifies the ideas on nutrition and exercise and pulls it all together to make a healthier life accessible to all in one manual for living. There are now many other books on similar lines and it is well worth looking at how you can positively change your life easily and pleasurably.

Screening is a difficult concept which sounds simple and very attractive; looking for signs of disease or better, pre-disease, in defined populations of people that when picked up can be dealt with at an early stage, saving complications or preventing death.

To have an effective screening programme a number of strict criteria must be met:

• The condition must be common enough in the population to be able to pick up sufficient cases to make it cost-effective. No good if the condition is rare.
• There must be an acceptable and inexpensive tests available which reliably pick out the cases. No good if the country cannot afford complex tests.
• Once detected, there must be effective treatments available which change the outcome. No good if you cannot improve outcomes.

There are in fact very few conditions that will meet these criteria at present.

There are many private services advertised as "screening". Many of these are not really screening in the proper sense and many are a waste of time, the information found being of no predictive value or worse, telling you things that do not matter yet may cause unnecessary worry and require further investigation. Some of this can be potentially harmful. There is, however, benefit in having some simple checks which we can do under NHS care in this practice - BP, cholesterol, lifestyle checks and so on. and you can book to see one of our Nurses or Health Care Assistant. You might like to check your Heart Age Test online.

The NHS runs several National Screening Programmes.

There are 6 programmes for antenatal and newborn:

• sickle cell and thalassaemia
• foetal anomalies (Down's etc)
• infectious diseases in pregnancy
• newborn and infant physical examination
• newborn blood spot test
• newborn hearing screening

There are 2 adult programmes:

• diabetic eye screening
• abdominal aortic aneurysms

There are 3 cancer screening programmes:

• breast cancer
• cervical cancer
• bowel cancer