Tag : test

How fast your heart beats may predict how long you live. There are a lot of fancy and expensive medical tests that can be done to determine your risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death. But there’s one test that you can actually do at home sitting on your couch that costs nothing, takes about one minute, and will give you a pretty good idea of your risk.

Here’s how you do the test. Sit quietly and rest for 15 minutes. Then find your pulse in your wrist or your neck and count the beats for one minute. If your resting heart rate is more than 84 bpm, your overall risk of cardiovascular disease goes up by about 40%. And the odds are you will live about a year and a half less than others your age.

But if you will lose your excess fat and start exercising, your heart rate should slow, and your risk should return to normal.

When doctors say "normal" patients hear "good". But in medicine, normal has a very specific meaning.

Normal is arbitrarily defined as encompassing 95% of the population. When your doctor says your test was normal, what he is really saying is that you are better off than at least 2.5% of the population on one end of the scale or the other. If your brain, heart, lungs, or bones are better than 3% or 97% of the people, you are equally normal. I don’t know about you, but given a choice, I will choose to be better than 97% rather than 3% every time. When your doctor says your test was normal for your age, it means at least 2% of the old fogies in your age group are worse off than you.

That is not acceptable. Tell your doctor that you won’t accept normal; you want optimal.