How's your health? You could have a comprehensive health assessment, which goes far beyond the basic medical exam, to get a detailed overview of your health and wellness. A comprehensive health assessment is a full examination that involves a number of in-depth screening procedures, including a health screening questionnaire with a number of health assessment questions. and is done by a team of healthcare professionals, including a physician, kinesiologist, dietitian and often a nurse.
An essential part of the comprehensive health assessment depends on you, the patient, to provide accurate information through the health screening questionnaire.
Types of Health Assessment Questions
“A Copeman health screening questionnaire looks at various parameters of a patient's lifestyle to try to determine where their risks may lay,” says Dr. Peter House, a physician and HealthChoicesFirst.com partner. “It starts with recording the height, weight and waist measurements, then looks at cholesterol numbers and blood sugar numbers. Next, we look at other lifestyle habits, asking questions such as what does your diet consist of, what is your exercise pattern, what is your alcohol intake, and do you smoke or have you smoked in the past?”
Another important section of the health screening questionnaire involves your family history. Many medical conditions and diseases have a tendency to run in families, such as heart disease, arthritis and cancer. The health screening questionnaire will ask about close relatives within your family who have had certain diseases and conditions, in order to determine your potential risk of developing those same diseases and conditions.
Do you know which environmental toxins you've been exposed to? Where we live, work and play definitely affects our overall health.
“A health screening questionnaire looks at environmental factors - whether or not you've worked in an industry where you may have been exposed to asbestos, arsenic, or toxic metals such as lead or mercury,” says Dr. House.
A comprehensive health assessment doesn't just look at your physical health. The physician will also consider your mental health in the health screening questionnaire.
“Mental health is a key component of any comprehensive health assessment, and it looks at whether or not there are stressors in your life that need to be addressed. It also looks at whether or not you've had a history of a diagnosis of a mental illness, such as anxiety disorder, depression, or bipolar disorder - formerly called manic depression,” says Dr. House.
There are a variety of questions that the healthcare team will ask you during a comprehensive health assessment to diagnose disease, determine your risk of developing a disease due to your family history, and to help you make lifestyle changes and set fitness goals.
Even if you feel 100 percent healthy, you may have an undiagnosed or misdiagnosed illness or condition that could be detected during a comprehensive health assessment. Serious health problems such as coronary heart disease and prostate cancer have been found during comprehensive health assessments, in surprised patients who had undergone routine medical exams and believed they were completely well.