The near year is a great time to get your life in order. Everyone is setting goals and resolutions, decluttering their homes, revamping their lifestyles, starting their side hustles and more.
All of this is exciting, but let’s not neglect the boring but equally important administrative tasks that we need to consider at the beginning of a new year. You guessed it – medical checks.
Nobody likes to do them, but we all know they’re important for our overall health. Here are a few check-ups you should be booking this January.
Dental Checks
Starting with the most daunting, you must remember to book a dental check-up in 2022. This is easy to neglect when it feels like there’s nothing wrong, but it’s always a good idea to have things looked at now and then.
When you’re in a new area, booking check-ups can be even tougher, because it’s hard to know how to pick a good dentist. You’ll need to do some asking around, research dentists in Brentwood or whichever region you’re in, and even check out online reviews.
Regardless of where you choose to go, taking that step is important. You might want to schedule a professional cleaning while you’re at it, to feel fresh for the new year.
General Health Checks
A visit to your family doctor once a year or so is important. Even when you feel A-okay, a deeper look into your heart health, blood pressure and other crucial factors is not something to neglect. Your doctor might want to run some blood tests to make sure that everything is functioning well.
A general health check is also a great excuse to ask those questions that haven’t felt important enough to book a whole appointment. That weird pain in your toe, the itch under your armpit, that new spot you found on your shoulder… You get the point.
Scheduling your annual check-up is a good way to ensure that you’re nipping any potential health issues in the bud, quick and early on.
Eye Tests
This is especially important for those of us who already have impaired vision and require visual aids. Getting your eyes tested once a year (or at least once every two years) is important in order to make sure that the prescription in your glasses or contact lenses is still supporting your vision.
Wearing outdated visual prescriptions can be damaging to your eyes, eventually become painful, and can even be dangerous if it begins to affect your driving ability.
More than this, simply checking out the general health of your eyes is an important annual task to add to your list.
Other Checks
A bonus check-up to add to your list is for your reproductive health and related issues. These are more specific to your age and gender, but are important checks to have and shouldn’t be sidelined.
Men above the age of 50 should schedule prostate screenings, while women of the same age should be having a mammogram each year. Furthermore, women of all ages should be repeating a pap smear at least every three years.