(FORTUNE Magazine) – Everyone who saw me that night--nurses, residents, doctors, technicians, and emergency room attendants--said the same thing: What I was experiencing was the male equivalent of labor pain. I agreed.

The hot, stabbing pains started around 11. By midnight I was doubled up on the floor, gasping for air. My wife helped me into a taxi, and ten minutes later I was on a bed in the emergency room in New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital where rapid-fire blood, urine, EKG, X-ray, and CAT-scan tests suggested that a kidney stone was working its way through my ureter en route to my bladder. Fluids were poured into me intravenously to help it along, and Demerol was added to ease the pain. By morning the worst was over, and I was sent home and told to rest.

The stone finally showed up three days later. Talk about timing. At that point I was 30,000 feet over Terre Haute, Ind., on my way to Rochester, Minn., so I figured I'd let the doctors at the Mayo Clinic deal with it. After all, it had been a year since FORTUNE sent me to assess the Mayo Clinic's highly touted Executive Health Program. After 22 days of heavy-duty testing, I concluded ("Me and the Mayo," July 21, 1997; see the fortune.com archive) that the 3,000 or so executives who travel to Rochester each year for physicals get a good return on their $2,000 investment.

But now it's a year later. Would a second visit be as good as the first? More to the point, is a thorough once-a-year checkup really necessary? "An annual physical is neither appropriate nor cost effective," says Dr. Lanny R. Copeland, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Others argue that an annual exam is what preventive medicine is all about.

I decided to see for myself, partly because I had a list of specifics I wanted the experts at Mayo to explore: a sore and ugly-looking pinkie, which everyone shrugged off as garden-variety arthritis; pain in both feet, which I had only partly resolved with orthotics; and pain and tingling in my shoulder and right arm. The kidney stone was an unscheduled bonus.

Things get off to an early start at Mayo. I checked in at 6:30 a.m., filled a urine bottle, watched as a technician withdrew several vials of blood, and posed for X-rays of my hands and feet. I had had a chest X-ray and an EKG a week earlier in the ER at Mount Sinai, so I opted out of both and headed upstairs for a 9:30 with Dr. Donald D. Hensrud, director of the Mayo Clinic's Executive Health Program and the internist who supervised my 1997 exam.

I handed him the tiny, jagged stone and asked if this was the cause of my agony. Probably, he said, but let's send it to the lab for analysis. Then we got down to cases. Hensrud was delighted I had cut down on salt and was working out regularly. I hopped on the scale (good news: down two pounds from last year), had a head-to-toe exam, and then hustled off for an MRI to see if anything in my neck was causing the pain in my shoulder and arm.

After lunch, Dr. Gordon Weller, a podiatrist, said my X-rays reveal mild degenerative arthritis at the base of my large toes, but that's normal for someone my age. He examined my feet, how I walked, and how my feet nestled into my orthotics. They're okay, he said, but you're still hyperpronating. Solution? A shoe store with a prosthetics lab in the basement. Thirty minutes later, my orthotics had a new pitch and a set of metatarsal pads that redistributed my weight away from my toes. For the first time in months, it didn't hurt to walk. Cost: $30.

The probing I got at my next stop hurt like hell, but my prostate is okay. There's a 50% chance I'll have another kidney-stone attack, said Dr. Donald Novicki, the urologist who roughed me up, so it would make sense to drink lots of fluids and avoid high-protein foods. Then it was back to Dr. Hensrud, who reported that my blood work reveals a world-class cholesterol reading and a low PSA, but that my uric acid and creatinine--two substances the kidneys are supposed to flush out--are a tad high.

To figure out why, I checked into the blood lab at 7 A.M. the next morning for an injection of a contaminant called iothalamate. At 8 A.M. and again at 9 A.M., blood was drawn and urine samples were taken to see how well my kidneys were clearing it out of my system.

The MRI on my cervical spine is back, and it looks as if the paresthesias--the fancy name for the electricity I feel in my arm--reflects a "narrowing of the neural foramina...caused by degenerative spondylotic changes" in my neck. "That's what the report says," said Dr. Edward R. Laskowski, "but we don't treat MRIs. Let's take a look at you." Laskowski spent the next 20 minutes pushing, pulling, and prodding to see how much damage the nerve irritation that caused the paresthesias has done. Answer: very little.

"That being the case," said Laskowski, "let's forget about heroic measures and try to relieve the pressure on your neck with a brace." The best brace: strong muscles. Enter Ann Hesley, a rehabilitation specialist, who gave me a crash course in posture--how to stand, walk, sit at a computer--and a series of exercises designed to strengthen the muscles in my neck.

I had a brief window in my schedule, so I scooted over to the immunization lab for a tetanus and diphtheria shot. I had had four needles already today. Why not a fifth?

Then down to see Dr. Harvinder Luthra, a rheumatologist, who poured over the X-rays, MRIs, lab results, and reports that now fill my file. He asked a few questions, then swung back to the hand X-rays. The right pinkie shows mild arthritic degeneration, he said, but no more than the others. He examined the finger, concentrating on the bulging joint. "I don't think this is simple arthritis," he said. "I think it's a tophus. Would you mind if I withdrew some fluid and looked at it under a microscope?"

Hey, what's another needle?

It was a tophus, a nodule filled with uric acid crystals. That ties in with the high levels of uric acid and creatinine in my blood, and with the results of the iothalamate clearance test, which show that my kidneys are not hitting on all cylinders. It all figures. A buildup of uric acid causes gout, and I've had two bouts in the past ten years.

"Complications of gout include joint disease, decreased kidney function, and stones," said Dr. Hensrud, "so our goal is to lower your body's production of uric acid." Allopurinol, the drug of choice, should do the job. Sounds good to me. But, hey, what did the lab say about my stone? "They ground it up and tried to do an analysis," said Hensrud, "but it was too small. Sorry. But if I had to guess, I'd say it was a uric acid stone."

That leaves just one open question: the need for--and value of--an annual physical. The medical profession may be split, but I'm clearly a believer. So's Dr. Hensrud. "I did a stress test on an executive last month and discovered he had had a heart attack he didn't know about. This obviously affected our recommendations. I doubt that he'd say the physical wasn't worth it."