Which department does disease screening go to?

If you have no clear discomfort and want to be screened for general diseases, you can directly contact the hospital's health management center (also known as the physical examination department). If you already have clear needs for targeted screening, such as wanting to check for specific diseases such as lung cancer and gastric cancer, you can also directly go to specialist outpatient clinics such as respiratory medicine and gastroenterology to issue examination orders.

Many people didn't understand this logic before, and always thought that all examinations must be done through the corresponding specialist. I met a 62-year-old aunt at the outpatient clinic last week. I originally wanted to do a full physical examination to check for high blood pressure, diabetes, and osteoporosis that are common in middle-aged and elderly people. I was stunned at the triage desk for half an hour. , I didn’t know whether I should be concerned with internal medicine, endocrinology or orthopedics. In the end, the introductory nurse pointed me to the health management center. They directly had a ready-made basic screening package for middle-aged and elderly people.

However, if you have clear discomfort or high-risk factors and want to be targeted for a certain type of disease, it would be more cost-effective to choose a specialist. For example, if a smoker of 20 to 30 years has been smoking for 20 or 30 years and has occasional chest tightness and cough recently, and wants to check for lung cancer, he can call the respiratory medicine department directly. The doctor will adjust the screening items based on your smoking history and symptoms. Originally, low-dose spiral CT is enough, and he will not prescribe useless high-dose examinations for you. If you are later found to have pulmonary nodules, he can directly assess your risk and give you follow-up follow-up or treatment suggestions. This is much more targeted than the general report interpretation of the physical examination center.

Nowadays, many people are confused about whether to choose a health management center or an oncology department for cancer prevention screening. There is indeed no unified opinion in the industry. Some doctors think that if it is just routine cancer screening, and there is no family history of cancer or related high-risk factors, it is enough to choose the basic cancer prevention package of the health management center, and there is no need to occupy the already tense number of oncology departments. ； However, many clinicians suggest that if there is a clear family history of cancer, for example, if two or more immediate family members have had digestive tract tumors, it is best to go directly to the oncology department for a screening program. The doctor can more accurately match the corresponding early screening program. For example, directly recommending that you have a gastrointestinal endoscopy instead of just drawing blood to check for tumor markers can avoid detours and prevent early risks from being missed.

There is another small detail that is easily overlooked: many community health service centers now provide free national cancer screening and chronic disease screening for those over 65 years old. These projects do not require registration. You can go directly to the public health department of the community to register. If you just do routine screenings within these policies, it will be a hassle to go to a big hospital.

You really don’t have to worry about which number to register for a long time. You can figure out whether you want to “widely cast the net” for routine screening or “precisely attack” to check for a certain type of problem. The former goes straight to the health management center, and the latter corresponds to the specialist. If you are really not sure, go to the hospital guidance desk and ask, it only takes two seconds~