Is it okay to have a routine physical examination in the afternoon?

In most cases, it is not recommended to arrange routine physical examinations in the afternoon, but if you only do items that do not require fasting, it is completely fine in the afternoon.

After all, routine physical examinations usually include items such as liver function, kidney function, fasting blood sugar, blood lipids, and abdominal hepatobiliary B-ultrasound that require fasting. What we mean by fasting is not just an empty stomach, but a state of not eating staple food, drinking sugary drinks, and drinking at most two sips of water for 8-12 hours. If done in the afternoon, you will either be hungry for more than ten hours until the afternoon, the body metabolism will be disordered, and the indicators will be inaccurate, or you will go after lunch, and the blood sugar and blood lipids detected will be too high for reference. A while ago, I was helping my employer arrange physical examinations. A girl was on a business trip and wanted to postpone her physical examination to Monday afternoon. She said that she had not eaten in the morning. It turned out that she had been fasting for almost 18 hours and her fasting blood sugar was almost 1 lower than the normal value. The doctor said that the results were useless and asked her to come in the next morning instead. The B-ultrasound of the liver and gallbladder is more obvious. After eating, the gallbladder will contract to release bile to aid digestion. Not to mention the small polyps and stones that cannot be seen clearly at this time, you might even mistake the physiological gallbladder contraction for cholecystitis, which will scare you for nothing.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do routine physical examinations in the afternoon. Nowadays, many people work from 9 to 5 and can’t find time in the morning. If your physical examination package does not require fasting, but only does blood routine, electrocardiogram, chest X-ray, thyroid color ultrasound, gynecological screening, etc., it will be much more comfortable to go in the afternoon. I went to the physical examination center on a Wednesday afternoon for my thyroid nodule review last month. There were two-thirds fewer people in the entire hall. There was no need to queue up for blood draws or wait for B-ultrasounds with the grandparents. Even the doctor who did the chest X-ray was free to give you a few words of caution. The whole process was completed in 40 minutes, which was much better than the two hours spent on weekend mornings. Now many physical examination institutions have recognized this demand and have specially opened non-fasting physical examination sessions in the afternoon, which are prepared for people who cannot make time in the morning or who only do part of the screening.

If you really can only arrange to do it in the afternoon, call the physical examination agency in advance to ask if the project you want to do can be done in the afternoon. Don’t make the trip in vain. If there are projects that require fasting, either make an appointment to do it separately in the morning, or don’t starve for more than ten hours to make up for it, which will affect the accuracy of the results. Nowadays, physical examinations are flexible. If you really can’t spare the entire time, you can split the fasting items and non-fasting items into two sessions. It’s better than trying to find a bunch of inaccurate results, right?