Live Long AND Prosper
Thanks to medical advancements, we’re living longer than ever before. We still have yet to achieve immortality, but a lot of time and resources are devoted to finding cures for major diseases like cancer. Although this progress is a step in the right direction, prolonging death doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be healthy throughout our entire life. We often neglect maintaining our overall health and wellbeing until it’s already too late.
On average, 95 percent of people experience at least one health problem in their lives, and the number of healthy years of life lost has risen nearly 50% since the 1990s. So, while the spread of infectious diseases is starting to decrease, the appearance of many other common health conditions like back pain, depression, diabetes, cavities, headaches, anemia, and hearing loss have increased.
Many of these conditions are brought on by factors like poor lifestyle habits, the rise in obesity and our aging population. It’s our human nature to think we’re indestructible, but we need to buckle down and face the fact that we’re all vulnerable to bad health conditions.
If we focused more on maintaining good health we could prevent ourselves from developing such diseases and health conditions before they start to appear. The goal shouldn’t be to wait until we have an ailment to treat it, but rather to make an effort to keep ourselves healthy on a daily basis.