A medical check-up or medical examination is carried out to ascertain a person’s state of health. Depending on the information obtained from the anamnesis, physical examination and complementary tests, a possible illness can be diagnosed.
Medical check-up or medical examination: what is it?
A medical examination or medical check-up is an examination that is carried out to find out the state of health of a person or to diagnose a suspected or possible illness.
The medical examination is performed by a specialist in Internal Medicine and is part of the clinical method, considering it as the process or orderly sequence of actions that doctors have carried out since the beginning of the scientific era. Therefore, it is the order followed by the physician to study and understand the process of health and disease of a patient in its social, biological and psychological integrity.
Phases of the check-up or medical examination
To carry it out, a general medical examination is performed in the context of a clinical interview and consists of:
– Anamnesis. It is the collection of subjective data related to a patient. It includes family and personal history, signs and symptoms experienced in his or her illness, experiences and, in particular, memories, which are used to analyze his or her clinical situation.
– Physical examination or physical examination. This is the set of scientific procedures that the physician performs on the patient to obtain objective data or signs that are related to the patient’s reason for consultation.
– Complementary tests or complementary exploration. A diagnostic test requested by the physician to confirm or rule out a clinical diagnosis. Such tests must be requested for a specific clinical indication and must be sufficiently accurate to be effective for that indication, as well as being as inexpensive and safe as possible. It should be emphasized that no diagnostic test is completely accurate and the results of all tests can cause problems of interpretation.
The socio-health information collected in the different phases of the medical check-up or medical examination is recorded in the patient’s electronic medical record. The medical record provides relevant information for the physician to diagnose diseases or health problems of the patient. It is also used to prepare reports and medical certificates on the patient’s health status.