Dr Sandra Cabot's Health Tips

TIP ONE

Have your own doctor

Have a yearly check up with your own doctor to detect diseases in their early stages.

Let your doctor know your family history. If you have a family history of heart disease, have a stress ECG at age 40 to 50. An ECG is an electrical tracing of your heart and can show many features that are important to detect and display problems you may be unaware of.

I saw a 50 year old women recently who had uncontrolled high blood pressure and her ECG showed that she had suffered a silent heart attack. If she had controlled her blood pressure she could have prevented this damage to her heart.

If you have a family history of cancer, when you get to the age of 45, have a colonoscopy and a blood test for tumour markers, which could indicate a silent tumour.

If you have to have an operation or begin taking long term medication, make sure that you get two or more professional opinions.

Nutritional medicine can often work well, either as an alternative to drugs or in conjunction with drugs, thus enabling lower doses of drugs to be used. This is why it’s called complementary medicine.