How long does a routine physical examination usually take?

If you choose a basic routine physical examination without special items, it can be completed in 1.5 to 3 hours under normal circumstances. If additional items such as gastroenteroscopy, enhanced CT, and magnetic resonance imaging require fasting and fasting in advance, and long waiting times, the total time may be extended to half a day or even a whole day.

However, the fluctuation range of this time is very large, and many people have actually experienced that the difference is not even a little bit different. Last week, I accompanied a friend to a public tertiary-level physical examination center. We arrived at 8:30 a.m. to catch up with the physical examination peak on Saturday. The B-ultrasound and blood drawing alone took more than 40 minutes each. The remaining tasks such as visual acuity testing, internal medicine consultation, and chest X-ray did not have to wait much. It was already 11:20 when they were all completed, which took almost 3 hours.

A friend also said that his last physical examination was completed in 20 minutes. It was a VIP package from a private institution he chose. He reserved an exclusive time slot in advance and was accompanied by a guide throughout the entire process. There was no need to queue at all, so it was naturally ridiculously fast. There are also group inspections that are chartered by the unit. They are arranged in advance and at staggered times. Basically, there is no need to wait, and most of them can be completed within an hour.

In fact, the time spent on purely project operations is really not much. It takes 1 minute to draw three tubes of blood. The total of routine palpation such as medical, surgical, and otolaryngology is less than 10 minutes. Most of the time is spent waiting in line, especially the abdominal B-ultrasound that requires holding in urine and blood drawing that requires fasting. They are often the two longest queues in the physical examination center. When there are many people, waiting for half an hour while holding in urine is not to mention how uncomfortable it is. It feels like the time has been doubled.

Some people think that if the physical examination is done too quickly, it is because the doctor is perfunctory. In fact, it is not the case. The basic operation itself is not that complicated. As long as the formal institution follows the procedures, there will be no difference in the quality of the examination between one that is completed in 20 minutes and one that is completed in three hours. The only difference is the waiting time. If you want to save time, my own experience is to check the real-time queuing progress on the official account of the physical examination center in advance, make an appointment for B-ultrasound or CT first, and then do things like blood draws that don’t require much waiting. This can save a lot of useless waiting time. This is how I took my mother for a physical examination last time. It was all done in 1 hour and 40 minutes, which is 2 hours faster than the last time I queued up on the weekend.