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