I thought this was the main goal of things like preventative medicine. Earlier testing, and more frequent testing allows you to catch things while you still 'feel healthy' so they do not become a chronic problem in the long term. Simple things like tracking weight, blood pressure over time. Add in things like colonoscopies, breast exams, I would say most medicine should be preventative, ie keeping you healthy, rather than reactive, of just trying to try you when you are ill.
Unfortunately most doctors’ training simply doesn’t cover preventative medicine. Most medical schools teach doctors pretty much only to respond to medical situations.
For example, a root cause of why there’s so much confusion among the general public when it comes to diet is that doctors receive very little nutrition training (maybe one course in their entire medical degree), so they know little about what the nutrition scientists are saying and have almost no knowledge of the primary literature and how to read and contextualize it.
And yet most people will give far more credence to doctors for nutrition advice over actual nutrition scientists and researchers even though the latter have real knowledge about the science, whereas the former are largely basing their ideas on conventional wisdom, or lately pushing fad/extreme/industry paid for diet because they realized they can make money off of it.
Things are improving, such as with heart disease doctors and their industry bodies because the link between diets high in say saturated fats and cardiovascular disease is so clear, they cannot ignore it, but the medical field has a long way to go still.
