The Importance of Primary Care

Baptist Health Louisville: The Importance of Primary Care

Doctor TERRY WEISS talks about the importance of building relationships with her patients and the role your primary care physician plays in your overall health.

Importance of Primary Care Health Talks Transcript

Terry Weiss, MD, Family Medicine
A primary care physician is a doctor that specializes in you. You want to have a physician who knows you, knows your medical history, knows your family history, and can help you when you have an acute medical illness, but also help provide preventive screening and health maintenance, things to help keep you healthy. There are three different kinds of prevention. There is the prevention that’s primary prevention, where we do things that help prevent disease from happening. There are screening tests that help us detect diseases that you might not know about, and then there’s management of diseases that you might have acquired over the course of your lifetime. A lot of this stuff, you don’t know you have. Hypertension, for one, most people have no idea they have high blood pressure, and then they come into my office and we’re doing a screening check by checking their blood pressure, and sure enough, their blood pressure’s elevated. High blood pressure that goes untreated can lead to kidney disease, and heart disease, and stroke, there’s all kinds of things that that can do over the course of your lifetime if it’s not treated. All those immune-preventable diseases, especially the ones we do for children, but also for adults with pneumonia shots and vaccinations, with tetanus, pertussis — that’s whooping cough, which we’re seeing quite a bit of these days — and also treating with a vaccination for flu. I mean, those are important things that if we can help prevent those things from happening to you, you’re going to be a lot happier person.