A Quick Thought on Measuring Health
Thoughts I’m thinking while following a vacuous, arrogant, self-congratulatory, and epically ignorant of history exposition on public health over on my Twitter feed…
It seems as if the entire world is in search for the magic metric that will allow us to measure, and then manipulate, health. Frankly, I’m stuck in my own search for a metric that combines Fitness (as defined by Greg Glassman), traditional western medical measurements (serum lipids, BP, waist/hip, etc.), and emotional well-being. Wouldn’t it be something if all you needed to do was accurately measure your pulse? What if your pulse, one of the easiest things to measure there is–all you need is a second hand and the ability to count–could predict everything about your health with the exception of bad karma stuff like depression or cancer? More than that, what if you then could be told what your pulse pattern needed to be and how to effect that?
In Scandinavia a long-term study was done on men looking at specific variations in pulse. Resting, peak, speed to peak, speed to recovery and the like were all recorded, and cardiac events/deaths were then analyzed against the data. The result of this research was a proprietary algorithm, the PAI (owned by a company called Mio Global) that posits a direct association between specific pulse patterns and longevity. Indeed, they boldly state that a PAI of 100 equals up to 10 additional years of life, presumably free of decrepitude (reflecting my CrossFit-affected view of life). Imagine for a moment how earth-shaking this would be. Having an actionable metric for health, especially one that is as easily accessible as your pulse, would allow us to critically evaluate a majority of health interventions available.
Nothing is that simple of course, but it is quite easy to envision a pyramid of health, not unlike our CrossFit pyramid of fitness, with a base that consists of your PAI. Layer on whatever you please, but the smart money is that something that looks an awful lot like CrossFit’s 100 words of fitness will be in there somewhere.
I’m off to take my pulse and then do a WOD.
Tags: bingo, Crossfit, glassman, health, Mio, PAI
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2016 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Crossfit, Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.