When it comes to your health, the best option to maintain optimal well-being is participating in a preventive care program. Preventive care helps your provider detect health concerns early, which gives the best chance of continued good health. Shoreline Family Health Care offers you and your family choices for prevention, making your care more affordable, with reliable providers who care about you. Our practice accepts patients of all ages and we welcome most types of insurance, including Medicare/Medicaid, as well as those who lack insurance coverage. The goal of preventive care is the maintenance of good health and to encourage a healthy lifestyle, thus reducing risk factors for conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. We also offer behavioral health services, along with our care, for the welfare of both mind and body.
Protecting yourself against the development of serious health conditions is the primary purpose of preventive care. Your primary care provider encourages you to come in routinely, typically on an annual schedule, to be screened for factors that can increase your personal risk of disease and ill-health. Tracking annual weight, blood pressure, complete blood cell counts, as well as checking blood sugar and cholesterol levels is a simple method of catching early-onset medical problems that can steal years of your life. Hypertension, or blood pressure, is a relatively common condition that silently causes damage within the human body, often with no one knowing until a provider performs an annual screening. High blood pressure can quietly damage blood vessels, which in turn increases a hypertensive patient’s likelihood of experiencing a stroke or a heart attack. Another devastating risk of untreated hypertension is damage to the kidneys by narrowing, weakening, and/or hardening the arteries there. When blood flow is restricted, a person’s risk of severe consequences, with possibly irreversible results, is heightened. This is where prevention comes in. Hypertension is often caught as the result of an annual exam before damage has been inflicted on your body, and thus treatment can begin immediately to lower the blood pressure to a healthy, safe level. High blood pressure is very simple to treat in the early stages, and by doing so, your provider is able to dramatically reduce your odds of damage to your organs.
At Shoreline Family Health Care, we welcome every member of your family, from birth to the golden years. Prevention is key for patients from day one. For children active in sports, we offer their sports physical every year. We monitor a child’s growth to ensure they are hitting milestones properly, as well as screening for any changes that alert us to problems early on. Knowing that children experience many challenges, we offer behavioral health services for kids whenever they may need it. From the hormonal changes and struggles of adolescence and puberty, to stepping out into retirement, we will be there to offer support and guidance every step of the way. When you reach your later years, we continue to offer annual exams, as well as check-ups while caring for you during the treatment of any conditions discovered during screenings. As you age, we pay attention to things related to cognition and age-related problems that are more likely in the later years of life, such as dementia and Alzheimers. We want every year of life to be as rich as possible, which is why early care is so critical to us.
Preventive care also screens each patient for early signs of conditions that require long-term care and monitoring. For instance, an annual physical exam may pick up signs of diabetes by screening the urine for excess sugar. No matter the age, diabetes is a serious challenge to any patient and having a provider make a quick diagnosis of the condition helps provide the patient with a chance to learn about the disease and prepare for the trials that diabetes can present. This way education is made possible before damage is caused. Learning about your blood sugar and any medications you may need to take, most likely for a long time, makes the diagnosis easier to live with. Whether insulin or oral medications, knowing how to manage your diabetes is another huge bonus of taking part in a program with Shoreline Family Health Care.
Another issue we consider important to address in a preventive manner is behavioral health. If you or your loved one has an issue they are concerned with, whether they are having feelings of depression, are anxious, or have problems sleeping at night due to worry, we want to help. We have staff trained to manage and treat behavioral health concerns, including a licensed therapist, as well as a trained psychiatric professional who can medically manage these kinds of issues when appropriate. Our first responsibility is to you, our patient. We want everyone who comes to us for medical care to know that we want to be there to prevent serious mind or body illness from the start. When we say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, that is not just hot air. It is a powerful truth that pertains to every part of our human condition. Do not get swept out to sea trying to manage your stress and mental well-being all on your own. We are here to help you navigate the waters by listening and understanding any concern you may have on your mind. Preventing mental conditions is every bit as important as healthy eating and physical illness, such as hypertension. By utilizing our full-service medical practice, you can be sure you are protecting your health and preventing further injury to every part of yourself.
Rather than waiting for problems to occur, take advantage of the preventive care we offer to every member of your family right here at Shoreline Family Health Care. It is our great privilege to assist each and every patient to live a long, happy, and healthy life, and we take that privilege to heart every day. Whether it is a major physical disease or condition, such as hypertension, diabetes, or a heart problem, or psychological diagnoses, like clinical depression, anxiety, or stress that interferes with your enjoyment of life, we are here to find such problems as early as possible. By doing so, it is our hope to give you more days of health and fewer days of suffering. We want to save you money by catching problems early before they cause serious damage, and we want to help you protect your health. Identify things that could derail your health by scheduling your appointment for a preventive check-up with us here at Shoreline Family Health Care.