Once a health problem becomes chronic, uncertain, and identity-threatening, even people who understand evidence, risk, and expected value can start treating plausibility as probability.
The penny took a little while to drop, but I understand now. Self-testing should be a marginal allocation within a health strategy, yet it has become the dominant part for many people.
That connects directly with the investment-portfolio metaphor in your article: we’re allocating too much money, time, and attention to novel, uncertain interventions, and too little to the established foundations of health—sleep, exercise, nutrition, preventive care, and appropriate medical treatment.
Anyway, that’s quite enough brain gym for me this evening.
Or like someone whose literal job was to test these things for many years :)
that said - 76% of Americans have at least 1 chronic condition (according to the US govt official numbers). I’m not the only one on trying to help myself !
Fair point and yes, the scale of chronic illness makes the demand for self-directed solutions understandable. The US-based nature of your estimate is also an important qualification: the insurance system makes the distinction between “healthcare” and “health” especially stark, with conventional care often covered while tests, treatments, and interventions marketed as optimisation are paid for privately. The difficult question is how to distinguish genuinely useful experimentation from an expensive market that monetises the gap between “might help” and “we have evidence it helps.
And that is the core of the question I’m trying to get to / propose a framework. In a world where interventions and solutions show up at much faster speed than we can run real studies on paired with consumer willingness to try (self testing is up 500% as conversation on Reddit as example), there is an allure to over do the self testing and undervalue all less. I think self testing is importsnt and so is (if someone wants to) trying new things, but that should be a marginal part of total money and time allocated vs all else. And right I beleive we have exactly reversed
This is sounding increasingly like Bryan Johnson.
Once a health problem becomes chronic, uncertain, and identity-threatening, even people who understand evidence, risk, and expected value can start treating plausibility as probability.
Which is also an important point - my allocation estimate is primarily based on US. Europe behaves differently because of the insurance system
The penny took a little while to drop, but I understand now. Self-testing should be a marginal allocation within a health strategy, yet it has become the dominant part for many people.
That connects directly with the investment-portfolio metaphor in your article: we’re allocating too much money, time, and attention to novel, uncertain interventions, and too little to the established foundations of health—sleep, exercise, nutrition, preventive care, and appropriate medical treatment.
Anyway, that’s quite enough brain gym for me this evening.
Et voila!
Or like someone whose literal job was to test these things for many years :)
that said - 76% of Americans have at least 1 chronic condition (according to the US govt official numbers). I’m not the only one on trying to help myself !
Fair point and yes, the scale of chronic illness makes the demand for self-directed solutions understandable. The US-based nature of your estimate is also an important qualification: the insurance system makes the distinction between “healthcare” and “health” especially stark, with conventional care often covered while tests, treatments, and interventions marketed as optimisation are paid for privately. The difficult question is how to distinguish genuinely useful experimentation from an expensive market that monetises the gap between “might help” and “we have evidence it helps.
And that is the core of the question I’m trying to get to / propose a framework. In a world where interventions and solutions show up at much faster speed than we can run real studies on paired with consumer willingness to try (self testing is up 500% as conversation on Reddit as example), there is an allure to over do the self testing and undervalue all less. I think self testing is importsnt and so is (if someone wants to) trying new things, but that should be a marginal part of total money and time allocated vs all else. And right I beleive we have exactly reversed