I was filling out a survey for an upcoming college reunion and the survey question was:
How would you characterize your health:
very healthy
somewhat healthy
in poor health
etc.
Well, I am in pretty good shape but I do have lots of drugs and high cholesterol and T1D. So a survey like that made me pause. I think I’m very healthy in terms of the stuff that I do - my diseases and conditions are not yet a barrier to my activities.
But given the number of chronic conditions I have, and the fact that they do impact my life, I don’t think ‘very health’ is an accurate description.
As anybody else wrestled with this question? How do you answer it?
A while back we had some folks here who were T1D and training for ultra marathons - remember @eric? you’d have to say they were ‘very healthy’ no?
Neither having diabetes nor having higher levels of HDLs (assuming that is what you meant by high cholesterol) mean you have poor health or, indeed, good health.
In both cases the conditions are correlated with poor health statistically but that doesn’t mean that all or, even, most people with those conditions have poor health. What it means is that a statistically significant higher proportion of people with those conditions have worse health than those without those conditions ceteris paribus (“all other things being equal”).
Ill health is something like cardiovascular disease or liver disease or kidney failure, or, for that matter, a broken arm.
The question does get interesting when we consider things that are exercise related. For example if you can swim 100m without stopping that would generally be considered a sure-fire indicator of good health even though for an athlete it might be considered run-of-the-mill. Contrariwise if you can’t do that it might be reasonable to say you are not “very healthy”.
Of course these things are relative. I’m 65, 66 in a few days time; does that mean I’m in poor health? Age is certainly correlated very strongly with poor health, but that’s not relevant. What is relevant is that age is correlated with loss of functionality in our bodies; my exercise levels aren’t much changed from what they were a few years ago but I certainly feel less able, so maybe less healthy.
Well, I guess it’s a college reunion so you are probably all about the same age and assuming you were born in 1959 you are about the same age as me. Good question for the reunionists; are you all in poor health because you are 66? How many of you have swum 100m without stopping (that’s 2 lengths of an Olympic swimming pool)?