re: What if everything is wrong with healthcare

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My clinical interest is longevity, which is a function of lifespan and healthspan; In math parlance, longevity = f (lifespan, healthspan). Lifespan is pretty easy to define. It’s the number of years you live. Healthspan is intuitively obvious, but a bit harder to define. For simplicity, let’s agree that healthspan is a measure of how well, not necessarily long, you live. Further, let’s agree that one without the other—long lifespan with poor healthspan or short lifespan with rich healthspan—isn’t what most people want. This has the makings of a complex, nonlinear, multivariate optimization problem.

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Lifespan, at the first order, is driven by how long one can delay the onset of atherosclerotic disease (CHD, CVA), cancer, and neurodegenerative disease. Delay the onset of these, and you live longer. It’s a probabilistic truism. Obviously, I will explain this in great detail at the appropriate time, but I don’t want to focus on this topic today.

Healthspan, in its most distilled form, is about preserving three elements of life as long as possible: Brain—namely, how long can you preserve cognition and executive function Body—specifically, how long can you maintain muscle mass, functional strength, flexibility, and freedom from pain “Spirit”—how robust is your social support network and your sense of purpose

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Our evolutionary ancestors were primarily concerned with survival. There was no survival more important than reproductive survival—ensuring you lived long enough to reproduce. Natural selection would prioritize short-term survival over long-term survival or quality of life. [As a very interesting, but too-nuanced-for-now aside, the evolution of APOE genes from the E4 to E3 to E2 variants may be great examples of this…yes, this will be discussed in the book, space permitted.]

Take stress response as an example. The stress response was an essential part of evolution. Without it, fending off an animal trying to attack you, or hunting for food in a state of starvation would not have been possible. Nothing about our evolutionary development selected for, or rewarded, equanimity. Our ancestors probably did not have the luxury of inner peace. It’s also not clear if it would have been necessary, or even helpful. But I argue that our current environment places sufficient non-evolutionary stress on us, and, as such, a hack that separates us from this stress is, indeed, helpful. Furthermore, we now have the luxury of aspiring to things our ancestors could never dream of. They were preoccupied with reproducing and not dying; we aspire to play with our great grandchildren, we machinate on our legacies, we argue about if the Oscars are really inclusive enough.

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Meditation, intermittent fasting, heavy compound joint and hip-hinge training, intense interval training, body work, supplements, drugs, introspection, sleep hygiene. These are my hacks. Let’s focus on one hack, in particular—movement preparation.

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