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Dr. Wender’s Preventive Care Tips

Richard C Wender, MD

Richard C. Wender, MD, Chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Jefferson Medical College and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and the first primary care physician to become President of the American Cancer Society, offers some important preventive care tips, most of which apply to heart disease and stroke as well as cancer prevention:

  • If you don’t have a primary care clinician whom you consider a regular source of trusted care, find one. This is something that people don’t think about nearly as much as they should, notes Dr. Wender. You cannot perfectly practice preventive services completely on your own; you must partner with someone you trust who can help guide, inform and counsel you, can arrange and order the screening tests you need, and, if you’re a smoker, can prescribe the therapies you need.
  • When you find that primary care source, schedule a check-up. Give them a chance to really focus on prevention. There’s great evidence that having a checkup makes a big difference.
  • You MUST find the time to focus on your own health. We are all so busy and so focused externally on the people who rely on us that it’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that you can’t do those jobs unless you take care of yourself. People have to believe in themselves, care for themselves and take that initiative – that facilitates everything else.
  • Get regular exercise. Dr. Wender recommends the equivalent of a 30-minute brisk walk five days a week.
  • Get age-appropriate cancer screenings. For women, those include pap smears for cervix cancer and mammography for breast cancer. For men, it’s the psa [prostate-specific antigen, a simple blood test to detect] prostate cancer, and for both genders, it’s a colon cancer screening.
  • If you smoke, there’s no higher priority than getting help with stopping. This comes back to the first tip, above – the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that if you undertake smoking cessation with the aid of a primary care clinician, your chances of long-term success are better.