Early Treatment

An effective health maintenance strategy includes seeking medical care promptly whenever an important new problem or finding appears. If you have a lump in your breast, unexplained weight loss, a fever for more than a week, or if you have begun to cough up blood, you should seek medical attention without delay. These may not represent true emergencies, but they do indicate that professional attention should be sought within a few days. Most times, nothing will be seriously wrong; on other occasions, however, an early cancer, tuberculosis, or other treatable disease will be found.

In many cases, you can take care of yourself with home treatment. However you must respond appropriately when professional care is needed. To ensure timely treatment, you need to have plan. Think things through ahead of time. Do you have a doctor? If you need emergency care, where will you go? To an emergency hospital? To the emergency room of a general hospital? To the on-call physician of a local medical group? If you are not sure what to do after going through this blog, who can you call for further advice? Have you written down the phone numbers you need?

Only rarely will you need emergency services. But the time that you need them is not the time to begin wondering what to do. If you have a routine problem that requires medical care, where will you go? Is there a nearby doctor? Who has your medical records? My next posts will answer these questions. But plan ahead.