How To Examine Yourself For Heart Disease

How can I examine myself for heart disease?

There are many disorders that you can examine yourself for at home and see if you have them. You can, in fact, examine your skin for skin lesions, although the dermatologist does do it a little more carefully and once a year on your birthday you ought to get your birthday suit examined. But in fact, with heart disease it's pretty tough because heart disease is inside; so we can't really see it. What you can see, and what you can be aware of, are the risk factors for heart disease, and some of those you can see quite easily. You can see, everyday in the mirror, if you're overweight or obese, and we know that that's a risk factor for heart disease, particularly for coronary disease. You can see if you're fit: if you've been exercising and engaging in physical activity. Physical inactivity is a risk factor. You can see if you smoke because the wrinkles on your face are emerging earlier than they would otherwise, and because your clothes smell of smoke. So if you smoke, stop. If you haven't started, don't start -- very important risk factors for heart disease. So those are things that we can check ourselves. We can check our blood pressure at home or in the local pharmacy or the local grocery store, and if the blood pressure is elevated, that's a risk for heart disease and needs to be treated. And it's simple enough these days to get your cholesterol checked at your health care provider. It's very important to work with your health care provider to make sure that you get all of those risks looked for, and that you get them all controlled really perfectly. There's no reason these days not to have all of those risks reduced really to normal, and you can do that by working carefully both on lifestyle and medication with your health care provider.