After tending to the needs of tens of thousands of patients, this medic says he has picked up on a concerning pattern.
Dr Alex Wibberley has told how he noticed that a lot of people who turn up to hospital suffering from 'serious medical problems' all seem to have one thing in common.
And given that the emergency medicine doctor and content creator is on a mission 'to help people from ever ending up in A&E in the first place', he's quite keen to do his best to nip this trend in the bud.
The expert is encouraging folks to keep a close eye on six health markers that medics often refer to when 'someone comes in critically unwell' - which he points out are the 'same ones that could have warned us years earlier'.
Advert
In a video shared to his YouTube channel earlier this week, Dr Wibberley explained that he estimates he has 'seen over 50,000 patients in his career so far'.
"And after a while, you start to see things that the textbooks don't really prepare you for," he told his 319,000 subscribers. "Patterns that you start to notice, again and again.
"The pattern I keep seeing isn't really about the emergencies themselves...it's about what came before those emergencies."
He explained that typically, patients suffering from serious medical issues such as a heart attack, stroke or organ failure tend to fill up hospital waiting rooms and the 'vast majority of these are over the age of 50'.
"That is not surprising on its own because as we get older, things go wrong," Dr Wibberley went on. "Our bodies age."
However, the UK-based medic has said that throughout the last decade of working in healthcare, he has spotted a certain cycle continuously cropping up that 'really bothers' him.
"We'll run the tests, we'll look at the results and realise that whatever brought this patient in has clearly been developing for years and years, sometimes a decade or more," the doctor said.
"And nobody has caught it. Or if they had, nobody has acted on it.
"Modern medicine is amazing, we can do amazing things - but we are terrible at preventing things from happening in the first place."
This is the worrying pattern that Dr Wibberley has picked up on throughout the duration of his career - and it's why he wants people to keep tabs on 'six key health markers that could predict your future risk of chronic disease'.
"These are the same markers we check in emergency medicine when someone comes in critically unwell…and the same ones that could have warned us years earlier," he said.
He reckons that the emphasis should be put on prevention rather than cure and believes this could become the norm if people start paying proper attention to their health by undergoing regular checks.
There's half a dozen markers that Dr Wibberley believes 'everyone should be checking every single year'.
"The thing is, most of these patients I talk about hadn't just been completely fine and then suddenly collapsed," the health expert continued. "They'd had symptoms. They'd felt a bit off.
"They felt tired in a way that felt a bit different for a long time. And almost universally, they'd put it down to getting older.
"Which is completely understandable, because when symptoms come on very gradually over months or years, your brain adjusts to them. They become your new normal."
Dr Wibberley added: "You've only ever lived in your own body. You don't have another version of yourself to compare all of these symptoms to."
The half a dozen markers that Dr Wibberley suggests keeping a close eye on are: blood pressure, triglycerides (a type of fat in your blood) and cholesterol, resting heart rate, kidney function, blood sugar and glucose levels, as well as your liver function.
He explained: "What are we seeing when we do these tests? Well, a lot of the time it comes down to one of a handful of things or more often, a combination of them. None of them are expensive or complicated.
"They are things that can be measured with a simple test often at home.
"The reality is that modern healthcare is excellent at treating disease - but far less effective at preventing it. And if you understand these numbers early, you give yourself a huge advantage."
Olivia Burke