Age Wise

5 Health Appointments Americans Should Schedule Now

Critical exams and scans are dangerously overdue for millions of people

Robert Roy Britt
Elemental
Published in
9 min readDec 8, 2021

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Image: Gerd Altmann / Pixabay

Preventive medicine and positive lifestyle choices are vital to good health, but the complex, expensive, frustrating and often anemic U.S. health care system can cause our collective health to deteriorate until we end up in overcrowded emergency rooms.

The pandemic has made matters understandably worse, at times forcing delays in all but emergency treatments at many hospitals, while discouraging people from getting routine checkups and important exams for fear of catching Covid.

As a result, scientists have estimated tens of thousands of preventable premature deaths will occur in coming years among people who didn’t get diagnosed with various cancers and other diseases early on when they were most treatable.

With so much on the line and on hold for so long now, I reached out to experts for suggestions on the most critical medical checkups overdue for many people, adding recommendations from leading medical organizations.

This is not a complete list by any stretch. It aims to be relevant to the majority of Americans based on preventing, primarily, the two leading causes of annual death: heart disease…

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Elemental
Elemental

Published in Elemental

Elemental is a former publication from Medium for science-backed health and wellness coverage. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Robert Roy Britt
Robert Roy Britt

Written by Robert Roy Britt

Editor of Wise & Well on Medium + the Writer's Guide at writersguide.substack.com. Author of Make Sleep Your Superpower: amazon.com/dp/B0BJBYFQCB