Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk
Was I supposed to wait until I was actually diagnosed with hypertension? The reason I go in for regular checkups is to detect problems and make corrections before they become acute.
That's what "maintenance" is supposed to do. There is where your entire misapprehension appears to be.
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The original context was with regards to annual physicals in people who are "healthy" and the value of taking a single blood pressure reading during that one annual visit. Such annual visits were outdated based on the studies showing no difference in outcomes if it were one year or several years for the visit. If a person has symptoms then they should see a doctor. However, early on high blood pressure does not have symptoms by itself. That was known at the time and the recommendations were still changed to get rid of the annual physical for people deemed healthy.
There are regular visits which are "monitoring" or as you call them maintenance visits where the person has health issue like being overweight or other health issues. That is not what we are talking about but being overweight can lead to high blood pressure and people love to it and there is lots of people overweight. People will continue to over eat regardless of blood pressure. Not all high blood pressure is due to being overweight.
The topic changed to what was the best way to check for blood pressure and most concluded that home reading were valuable rather than a doctors visit solely for the BP check.
The other topic dealt with what constitutes an office visit with regards to insurance requirements and they have their standards that are required which included hands on vitals. There's state board regulations also requiring hands on evaluation when diagnosing etc. Because of those two facts there were state regulatory changes for the alliance of Telemedicine to take place waiving the face to face hands on aspect.
My position was that the trend based on technology will allow for less hands to hands in the future and it will be up to the doctor to determine when your body is needed in person.
We have endoscopy where they use can take out your appendix using a camera. There is robotic surgery where camera and imaging is used. I would rather than an MRI than to have a doctor palpate my abdomen. There are other things more accurate than having a doctor look down your throat or listen to your heart. The old ways are to save money and not for more accuracy.
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