
How Primary Care Can Promote Your Health and Wellness

Primary care medicine is a wide-ranging specialty that serves as both the initial point of contact between a patient and the healthcare system, and the access point to the information and resources the patient needs for the best health outcomes. Primary care providers (PCPs) are more generalists than specialists, having a broad knowledge of the types of physical, psychological, and social conditions that affect their patients.
At Omni-Med Family Care & Urgent Care, Dr. Roger DiRuggiero and our staff provide seven-day-a-week primary care and urgent care services at our office in Florham Park, New Jersey. We believe that building a relationship with a trusted primary care provider is the best way to optimize your overall health, leading to the detection and treatment of medical problems before they become serious. Here’s what they want you to know about how primary care can promote your health and wellness.
The goals of primary care
There are several goals of primary care, including:
- Improving public health by providing easy access to medical care
- Focusing on the whole person rather than on a specific illness, organ, or system
- Preventing disease
- Diagnosing and managing common and ongoing health problems
- Referring patients to specialists as needed
Primary care physicians are uniquely positioned to understand and study the course of diseases over time, as well as the family setting, including hereditary factors, in which the patient lives.
The types of PCPs
There are many different types of practitioners who can serve as PCPs, and every one of them can act as a point of entry into the healthcare system. These include:
- Primary care physician
- Family practice doctor (treats the entire family)
- Internist (treats adults only)
- OB/GYN
- Geriatrician (treats the elderly)
- Pediatrician (treats children only)
- Nurse practitioner
Each of these PCPs typically has a certain patient group with which they’re most familiar, and they possess a greater knowledge of the health problems that most commonly affect these patients.
The primary care physician, also known as the general practitioner, is the most common type of primary healthcare provider. He has the most general knowledge of patient illnesses, along with the widest range of patient types.
The types of conditions PCPs treat
Primary care covers all aspects of patient care, including disease prevention and screening, diagnosing new ailments, and managing chronic conditions, such as:
- Diagnosing and treating high blood pressure
- Diagnosing and treating high cholesterol
- Diagnosing and managing heart disease
- Managing arthritis, diabetes, and other chronic diseases
- Managing chronic pain
- Screening for thyroid problems and other hormone imbalances
- Screening for STDs
- Screening for depression and anxiety
At Omni-Med Family Care & Urgent Care, we use a holistic approach to treatment. We treat the whole of you, not just your symptoms, and we choose natural therapies over medications whenever possible. As we also provide urgent care services, we can treat wounds and fractures right in our office — there’s no need to go to the emergency room.
And as your PCP, we perform your annual physical exam. This yearly visit allows us to conduct blood screenings for potential disease markers and determine your overall fitness. It’s also a time for you and Dr. DiRuggiero to sit down and discuss any concerning symptoms you may have noticed during the past year.
At the same time, he can provide you with guidance for lifestyle changes and nutritional guidance, such as getting a jump on weight gain before it leads to heart disease or diabetes, as well as for overall disease prevention.
And because we see you over a period of years, we get to know you and can put the medical information in context, always keeping an eye out for your overall health.
If you want to learn more about what primary care can do for you, give us a call at 973-377-8776, schedule an appointment online, or walk in to our urgent care clinic. Your health and wellbeing are very much our concern.
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