Health maintenance recommendations

If you are enjoying good health, there are some things we want to do to as routine surveillance in order to enhance the likelihood of early detection of underlying abnormalities. The concept of a "yearly physical" or "annual exam" has been replaced by the much more useful concept of evidence based testing. This allows us to avoid unecessary testing, which adds cost but no value, and perform age and risk stratified surveillance which is much more appropriate.

Here is a link to the best evidence based source of health maintenance recommendations which I use to serve as the basis for routine surveillance. As you study this information, you will see that many old ideas have been replaced. For example, the yearly Pap smear has been abandoned - The USPSTF found no direct evidence that annual screening achieves better outcomes than screening every 3 years.

Don't let the information that you get from unreliable sources serve as the guide for your care. Use the information on this site and share it with the uninformed with confidence. Click here to see the recommendations by topic: http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/uspstf/uspstopics.htm and here to see the same guidleines organized by category: http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/cps3dix.htm. By category is a better place to start for general reference.