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How Do You Decide What's Good for You?

Three separate decisions get made every time somebody deals with their own health, and people who agree about one of them often disagree about the other two: how early you want a thing looked at, whose judgment you want it looked at by, and whether the goal is to be free of problems or to be better than that.

Thirty-six statements, about six minutes, and a point inside a cube. Answer for what you would choose, not for what has already been decided for you — and note that none of this is medical advice or a judgment about how anyone handles any of it.

36 questions

Answered 0 of 36

  1. 1 Second-guessing a professional mostly makes things worse.
  2. 2 I would take something that made an ordinary day better, not only something that fixed a problem.
  3. 3 Every test has a cost, and the cost is not only the test.
  4. 4 Guidelines are written for a population, and I am not a population.
  5. 5 I have questioned something a clinician told me.
  6. 6 I would rather give a body time before doing anything about it.
  7. 7 Being as well as most people is not as well as I want to be.
  8. 8 I want to understand the reasoning before I go along with it.
  9. 9 Once something is fixed, I want to stop thinking about it.
  10. 10 I would rather leave a working system alone than try to improve it.
  11. 11 I would rather be treated according to what usually works than according to what I have concluded.
  12. 12 Looking for problems turns up things that would not have mattered.
  13. 13 I would trust my own reading over a recommendation I did not find convincing.
  14. 14 There is a lot of distance between not being ill and being in good shape, and it is worth crossing.
  15. 15 Much of what gets treated would have settled without treating it.
  16. 16 Getting older is a set of problems, and some of them have answers.
  17. 17 The person who trained for a decade knows more than I will find in an evening.
  18. 18 Waiting to see what happens is how small things become large ones.
  19. 19 I have stopped taking something because I could not tell it was doing anything.
  20. 20 I would rather live with a small uncertainty than start a process I cannot stop.
  21. 21 Normal is a perfectly good target.
  22. 22 I would rather aim past where I started than back at it.
  23. 23 I would rather know about something early, even if it turns out to be nothing.
  24. 24 What a body can do at forty is more a matter of choices than of years.
  25. 25 I would rather act on something small than watch it.
  26. 26 Consensus is slow because it is careful, and I would rather have careful.
  27. 27 Chasing improvements past the point of being well is a way of finding new things to worry about.
  28. 28 I take up the checks that are offered at my age.
  29. 29 I have decided against a test that was offered to me.
  30. 30 When the advice is settled, I follow it and stop reading.
  31. 31 A test I did not need is a better outcome than a problem I missed.
  32. 32 Health is the absence of something wrong rather than a thing to accumulate.
  33. 33 When I am given something to take, I look up what it does.
  34. 34 I keep an eye on measurements about myself so that a change would show up.
  35. 35 I read up on something before I take somebody's word for what to do about it.
  36. 36 Somebody who has seen a thousand of these knows something I do not from seeing one.