I’ve known for a while that I wanted to get whatever additional testing made sense at the time of my next physical. Well, since I’ve been at the doctor’s office quite a bit lately due to my ankle injury, I decided to go ahead and get my annual physical, which is a few months overdue anyway. It was a good opportunity to ask my doctor about what he recommends in terms of optional testing.
The usual tests provide some very useful data, such as cholesterol level, liver enzyme levels, PSA levels for prostate health, and others. I think these particular tests are probably determined by what insurance covers for a particular patient’s plan. But there are other tests you can get if you don’t mind paying extra and possibly going through some additional lab procedures.
I’ve done a lot of reading in the last year about health, nutrition, supplementation, and medicine. However, I have not distilled all of that into a list of data points that I need. So I asked Dr. Bicak what he would recommend for someone who, like myself, is perhaps a little more concerned about his health than the average person.
I already knew I wanted to get a testosterone test, based mainly on what I read about the benefits of testosterone in the book Real Age. Dr. Bicak said that this was reasonable.
He recommended a test for vitamin D. The best source of vitamin D is sunlight, and most people do not get enough. It’s a delicate balance, because you can certainly be overexposed to sunlight as well. A test could reveal a deficiency that could be corrected with supplementation.
Anemia is a serious disorder characterized by an insufficient number of red blood cells. These are the cells that carry oxygen around the body. This is one of the tests I will have.
A calcium scan is a special x-ray of the heart. Dr. Bicak related a case of a patient that he recommended for a calcium scan. The test detected a form of lung cancer which is almost always fatal, but it was detected early enough that the patient was able to be treated and survive. Since cardiovascular disease is the number-one cause of death, I’m interested in anything that can help prevent it.
Another test that can catch cardiovascular problems is a vascular ultrasound. This is an ultrasound scan from the neck to the legs. I’ll need to go to a hospital radiology department for this.
There is a specific blood test that can detect pancreatic cancer, something I would definitely like to avoid. They took a lot of blood samples on my exam day, for tests such as this one, which gets sent off to a lab with the other blood samples.
Normally I would not have a urinalysis as part of my physical exam, but I did this time in order to have a test done to detect problems with kidney function.
I think the total cost of this visit was about three hundred dollars. That did not include the ultrasound and calcium scan, which I’ll have done elsewhere and the results sent back to my doctor. It is pretty expensive, and comes out of my insurance deductible. So it may be something I want to do less often than once per year. But I think these are all good tests to have. Early detection of disease is a big factor in how successful treatment can be, and when it comes to cancer, you can’t be too early, ever.
Do you get additional testing above and beyond what is standard when it’s time for your physical? I’d love to hear what your doctor recommends and what you think about these extra checks. Drop me a line on the contact page at http://RunningAFEVER.com/contact. Thanks for reading!
Sources:
Dr. A.D. Bicak:
http://theclinic.md/about-dr-bicak/
Mayo Clinic:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/anemia/symptoms-causes/syc-20351360
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/heart-scan/about/pac-20384686
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