The following note is based on my health-related explorations until the end of 2014.
*
Have you played with the Google Ngram Viewer? It displays a graph showing the occurrences of a word or phrase in books from 1800 to 2008. For example, here’s a graph for “data”, “knowledge” and “sex”. Guess which word is most frequently used in today’s times? While “knowledge” surprisingly makes a better appearance than “sex", it’s “data” that explodes, particularly after 1960. But here’s an even more amusing graph - even as “data” increases, “wisdom” gradually declines.
I know you are finding flaws in this data-wisdom hypothesis. I did too but am trained to find data that validates whatever I feel. The healthcare industry is booming with data from every angle - doctors perform more tests, patients wear more tracking devices and the government provides incentives in exchange of data. However, all this data hasn’t yet reduced our disease burden very much.
According to the CDC and WHO, the leading causes of death relate to heart disease, cancer, respiratory and stomach infections and diabetes - avoidable, delay-able, only if we really wanted. My work and curiosity led to me examine behaviors of doctors, patients and health systems in diverse places (from remote India to Sri Lanka to South Africa to Laos). Regardless of where they lived, some people were healthier than others. Some people were sicker than they should be. Some people didn’t yet know if they were healthy or sick.
Why Healthy People Are Healthy
In reality, healthy people seemed to be largely responsible for their own health - they were not particularly dependent on doctors, society or even a government. Setting aside unavoidable factors (e.g. accidents, undetected cancers, viruses and such), here’s why healthy people are healthy.
1) Inheritance: Just as with wealth, healthy people inherit a large dose of healthy genes that last beyond a lifetime. This overrides most other factors. DNA (our body’s software) is not just what we acquire from our forefathers but also the code that we actively write based on our behaviors and environment. We pass this on to our offspring, which sets the starting line for their health.
2) Environment: Where we live, whom we live with, where we work, the kind of work we do, how we commute, our societal environment as a whole constantly shapes the health of our mind and bodies. Overall, healthy people have simple hygiene - such as washing hands, cleaning utensils, using clean bathrooms, breathing cleaner air that makes them less susceptible to diseases.
3) Physical: Healthy people cultivate a habit of not causing harm to their bodies through drugs, tobacco, narcotics, alcohol, fatty food and so on. They eat in moderation, according to a routine, according to the changing weather and often mindfully. They have a sense of eating a diet in line with their ethnic backgrounds. They are physically active (they walk, dance, play and exercise) and get a fair exposure to sunlight.
Being active, makes them better perceive symptoms - early signals of falling sick. They seek medical help before these symptoms manifest into diseases that cling on.
4) Psychological: Whether through meditation, prayer, family and friends or service to the community, the healthy have figured out a way to view life through its larger lens and stress less. They carry fewer negativities to bed and usually sleep well.
Healthy people are often responsible for someone or something, making them less self-focused, more useful in their own eyes and therefore less lonely (usually the primary cause of depression).
*
That’s it. And yet we seem to be making medical care more complicated than it needs to be. Of course, data is extremely useful but the causes of good health are far more simpler.
Using the Ngram Viewer, I searched for other keywords that might match up with “data” - and I found “god” (converges in 2001). Go figure. Happy new year!
