Pregnancy

How Often Should I Visit The Doctor?

This is a question that we often ask our whole life, but during pregnancy, you need to understand the importance to schedule visits to your health care practitioner on a regular basis for planning, check-ups and preventive medical care for you and your developing baby.

You should be aware that both health maintenance and disease prevention are high priorities preparing yourself for the next nine months.

The first visit is often a friendly chat just to get to know each other better, talk and write down your medical history and discuss whatever you do not understand or fear , including your worries. That early visit should occur as soon as you are totally certain of your pregnancy.

At the first visit, it is normal that doctors perform a Pap test, check your cervix, and also take a blood test checking for anemia or sexually transmitted diseases, which can be potentially harmful to the baby.

The blood test can also detect immunity to rubella (German measles), a very contagious viral disease caused by the rubella virus, causing fever, swollen lymph nodes behind the ears, and a red rash starting on your face and spreading to the torso and then to the legs and arms.

Later, at each of your following appointments, your urine will be tested every time to check for sugar and protein levels, because high sugar levels can reveal gestational diabetes, another risk to you and your developing baby.

Unfortunately, many healthy women develop diabetes during pregnancy that is why those tests need to be performed at every visit, since excess of protein can be a sign of kidney disease or a urinary tract infection.

Along with all those tests, the doctor will check other factors, such as your weight at every pregnancy stage, your blood pressure, as well as your baby's heart rate, which can also be measured throughout all the months of pregnancy.

Changes to your habits, diet and lifestyle are recommended during the first visits, prescribing pre-natal vitamins and mineral supplements if necessary to ensure all the nutrients that you and your baby will need for healthy growth and development.

During the second trimester of pregnancy, visits to the doctor are limited to once a month, including the possibility of one extra visit for an ultrasound scan around your fourth month, if you want to know more about your baby, or if the doctor needs to determine the baby's size and position.

It is not until the last trimester that you will see the doctor more often, every two weeks, and then once every week in the ninth month, to monitor your blood pressure, weight, and all the conditions of your baby.