Twenty-odd years ago, I saw a tv ad for the drug Paxil. It was about social anxiety disorder. Didn’t know that was a thing, so I never looked into fixing it.
Talked to my doctor about it. Got a prescription, took the medication for several years. It changed my life for the better.
That may be a culture difference, and it might not even be entirely healthy (with the god doctor syndrome), but from where I stand your relationship with your doctor and/or his skill was not where it should be if he doesn't regularly ask you the usually basic/boring questions that detect there is an issue to fix, and you don't naturally tell them you feel bad about X or you have this or that issue.
I get a $100 bill minimum any time I step foot in the doctors office. It's not somewhere I'm going to go for casual health questions. There's a fairly high bar that needs to be crossed before I even entertain the idea.
Pretty much every studies show that the best working medical system are those with the best screening and prevention in place, among with are regular (usually free in Europe) checkup, accented for at risk population (child, aged people,...). Depending on your age in France there are lots of yearly /every 3 years checks entirely free that the national health agency push you to do.
So I may have assumed that yes but then if not it goes back to my original parent point of it being a sign of a broken system.
That my insurance, and by extension, my ability to maintain a relationship with any one doctor is tied to my job, means that when I change jobs, there is a high likelihood that I now may no longer have a plan available to me in a network with said doctor, or, if I do, it may not be available at the same price. And of course, a gap in employment or employment by a company that does not offer much or any coverage means an even more precarious situation.
Even if you're making the effort to get regular screenings here, there's a good chance youll be seeing a doctor who is both caught in a slog of appointments with a maximum length of fifteen minutes as dictated by the insurance company and who you have never seen before
The value of an ongoing relationship is something that is dismissed as valueless by large corporations who would prefer that all goods and services be seen as completely fungible - with the existence of any particular person on either the buy or sell side simply an irksome artifact of the system that they have not yet been able to squeeze out via automation or otherwise.
Talked to my doctor about it. Got a prescription, took the medication for several years. It changed my life for the better.