How to improve your health by visiting your doctor regularly

It's one thing to be neglectful of one's health when things are going fine. But to ignore symptoms and "let nature take its course" when health problems emerge is highly risky. Your immune system can battle back against minor infections well enough, but beyond that, nature taking "its course" often means you get worse, not better. Everyday symptoms like headaches, lethargy, dizziness or chronic coughs can often be indicating the emergence of more serious diseases — including life-threatening heart attacks, strokes and cancers. Here are some ways to stay healthy by visiting your doctor regularly.

If you have your health, then you are lucky — no clear damage has come about as a result of your self-neglect. Still, get yourself to a doctor today!

• A full checkup and a new approach to health, in which you are highly mindful of your body's health signals, are essential to healthy living.

Early diagnosis of chronic problems is worth far more than you can imagine. So is losing the uncertainty related to your undiagnosed symptoms and health problems.

• These benefits far outweigh the financial and emotional costs of consulting a doctor.

Change your attitude. So many men — and plenty of women too — have an I-don't-need-a-doctor attitude, as if suffering in silence is a virtue and going to see a doctor a defeat. It's time to change that.

• Your doctor is essential to your achieving long life and long health. Treat him or her as a welcome participant in your successful future.

• Pain specialists agree that early pain relief is best.
• Left alone, chronic pain can create hard-to-break feedback loops in your brain.

• Visit the doctor at least once per year.
• Ask for an annual physical with a blood workup.
• Women should also see their gynecologists.

Do you have an odd-looking mole? An abnormal bulge? Unusual bloating?

• Take any strange symptom to your doctor's office if it persists for more than two weeks.

• Once a year is the minimum for seeing your eye doctor and your dentist, too.

• If there were smokers in your household when you were young, or if at any time in your life you were heavily exposed to daily smoke, talk with your doctor about screenings for lung cancer and for a breathing problem called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
• Your doctor might use computed tomography (CT) equipment to get a detailed picture of the interior of your lungs, or check your lung function to see how much air you're breathing in and out — and how much oxygen you're absorbing.