I'm with Steve regarding PA's. Until last year I had not seen a doc since we moved to San Francisco in 2009, other than a specific non-life-threatening situation that obviously required a day surgery procedure during our first year here. A couple of issues prompted me to finally go for a physical 6 months ago. The PA spent a full hour with me taking a full medical history and discussing at length various concerns and potential issues that an old man of 50 should be thinking about. The blood work showed higher than ideal cholesterol and in our followup conversation he basically left it up to me to determine if/how I wanted to proceed on that front. Reading Steve's post about the ratios confirmed my thoughts on the subject at the time (no statins unless absolutely necessary) and I will be rejecting any efforts to put me on statins, but may ask for more tests next time of my pattern A and pattern B LDL. After that conversation I came to realize that that one issue (statins) was one of the main things that kept me out of doctors' offices for 8 years.
The issue which ultimately pushed me to see the PA was tinnitus. He didn't deal with that in any substantive way beyond explaining what does/doesn't cause it (allaying my fears that I had some underlying serious issue) and then gave me a referral to a specialist to look into it in more depth.