The word follow-up It is used extensively in our language and fundamentally in two senses, on the one hand, to indicate the action of following something or someone, this sense being a synonym of popular use of the concept of persecution.
Follow something or someone or exhaustive monitoring of a process
And this same word is also used to indicate the detailed and in-depth observation and surveillance that is carried out on a subject or on a person.
Follow-up is a resource that allows you to carry out an acute contemplation on various activities, in order to then be able to make the right decisions.
Generally, this use of the term appears a lot at the behest of contexts of police, judicial, detective investigation (a private investigator is hired to investigate and follow a person with the mission of discovering what he is doing), medical, scientific, statistical, among others, with the mission of observing and analyzing how evolves a case. In any case, the concept can be applied to any type of research, project or process that requires constant observation.
Discovering a crime red-handed
In the specific case of the police, this body spends much of its time and effort tracking individuals who are presumed to be linked to a criminal act or criminal organization.
Meanwhile, from this follow-up, which of course must be carried out with great care to avoid being discovered, a fundamental clue can be obtained to solve a case, or else catch someone red-handed, that is, committing an offense.
Many security forces, to catch and disrupt criminal gangs, tend to infiltrate them with false identities, thus being able to follow their every move, and prepare the best moment to hit them.
Medicine: follow the evolution of a patient
On the other hand, at the urging of medicine, it is common for medical professionals to follow up their patients after diagnosing them with a particular condition.
This follow-up is essential because it allows us to appreciate first-hand the evolution or not that the patient is presenting before the prescribed medication or the practices aimed at treating their disease.
This follow-up, especially when it comes to a serious disease, is constant and should not stop being so until the doctor notices that the patient responded satisfactorily to the treatment and the initial serious picture has disappeared.
On the other hand, follow-up allows the doctor to change the treatment if a positive evolution of the patient to the stimuli is not observed.
In the commercial field, monitoring is also common to find out the performance of a new product or service, that is, the impact it had on the public, how sales evolve, among other factors.
When in the follow-up it is noticed that the results are not as expected or projected, changes may be introduced aimed at favoring the acceptance of the product in question.
Accompany or chase someone
It should be noted that the follow-up can have a positive purpose by calling it some way, for example, having the mission of accompanying a person in some activity that he does so that he performs it satisfactorily; A father who periodically follows his son's studies does so with the clear objective that he can advance without complications in them and if any inconvenience is evidenced, the follow-up will allow the father to take the necessary measures so that his daughter can overcome the problem , such as sending your child to a private teacher to improve in the subject that is weaker.
Or, failing that, it may present a negative purpose, such as those cases in which one person incessantly follows another with obsessive overtones.
There are romantic relationships in which one of the two parties can fall into an obsessive situation that triggers the need to know all the time what the other is doing, while, for this, they often implement monitoring per se or in charge of another person.
Now, nothing good can be expected from a relationship that veers in this direction.
Obsession in any plane in which it occurs is negative, full of distrust and darkness to the person who suffers from it.
As we have already indicated lines above, that of persecution is the most used synonym for this term.
