It is expected that by the year 2030 number of adults older than 65 will double. And it means, as I see it, that the cult of youth will be even more strong by the year 2030 than it is today. I could imagine many people will be dreaming of being Dorian Gray. Many are already doing it with plastic surgery and pills. But it is now called “improving quality of life”.

Equilibrium is lost. Population keeps growing, the amount of goods keeps growing, but goods are becoming more and more concentrated in hands of a very narrow society. This society is becoming progressively older but it struggles to keep the goods with itself. I think it is degenerating and the only thing it can offer to the world is its own disappearance.

Anyway it won’t happen tomorrow, tomorrow another thousand of mice will be killed in the name of science, in the quest for longevity. Well, if there is a balance in this universe, I think there must be some parallel world where mice carry out experiments on scientists without turning a hair.

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• Too much information leads to obesity
• Too little information leads to emaciation
• Low-quality information leads to indigestion
• High-quality information requires effort
• Too much same information leads to surfeit
• Unreasonable consumption leads to disease
• “Fast information” is a huge business
• “Brain obesity” is a common disease
• Information diet and brain training are cure
• Information diet and brain training are procrastinated

Are you keeping a diet?

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Do you remember your first physical education lessons? I don’t. And I know why — I haven’t learnt anything from it.

Teacher said “run” and we ran. Teacher said “chin-up” and we did it. Teacher said “play volleyball” and we started playing.

There was no learning by any means, all these years. There was training. Physical education today is about participating in activities you are supposed to be familiar with.

I think there is a big problem here: we don’t know the “why” of movement. There is a typical situation: through years of running we never ask ourselves such simple questions like “am I running the right way?” or “what are the other ways?” We just do the same old thing learned somewhere in times we can’t remember.

The most important knowledge about movement is unfamiliar to many of us. The most important knowledge is about knowing different ways to do the single thing. It gives us a freedom of choice.

We don’t have a freedom when we know only one way to do something. Example: one way is one pattern of gait. I’m sure you can recognize your friends by only seeing them walk, even in a crowded place, even if you know nothing about their dress. Don’t you?

We don’t have any idea of what the pleasure of movement looks like. There are many people for whom movement is pain. But they have no choice, they are doomed to persist doing that same old painful movements. Don’t they ask themselves “am I doing something wrong?” question? Probably no.

What all this has to do with education? Everything!

There are countless statements claiming that one of purposes of education is to make students who value health and maintain healthy lifestyle. All these statements are failure. Because of a single evident reason: in present society health is a status quo. And we value and maintain this status quo with diligence. That’s the result of education (or of its lack).

Health is an idea, but body is not, movement is not! We care about our ideas, not about bodies. We remember about bodies only when it is almost too late. Why? Because we are unable to see small changes!

What should be done by education is teaching kinesthetic literacy: “why’s” and “how’s” of movement, seeing small differences and small changes. And it is more about parents than about schools.

The biggest “why” of movement.

“The initial purpose of movement is staying alive”. How many times have you heard this from school teachers?

The knowledge trick with incorrect posture

Incorrect posture, faults of posture is a very common problem and a very common habit. (Even language depicts it – look at phrases “imperial bearing” or “majestic bearing” – they describe correct posture, but they sound like it is something rare.)

Do you know the big “why” of posture faults? We don’t have any reasonable knowledge that motivates us to change it. Only “you should”, “you must”, “it is better”, “it is healthy” and so on.

But there is a very strong reason. Here it is. When your posture is correct (or majestic) you are able to move in any direction, run, jump, bend down and so on as fast as possible — you are free with movement and it increases your chances to survive.

When it is incorrect you are unable to do some kind of movements: e.g. if your head is bent down (today it is very common everywhere) you are almost unable to control your jump — try it and you’ll see. If you are in the wild and you can’t control your jump – you are dead. Think of that for a moment.

Everything in the nature is strictly reasonable. The education should give the children this truth from the very beginning. The kids need to learn it by doing. Only then we will have the right to claim something about educating healthy living.

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Although it is being talked a lot about gerontology, transhumanism and even immortality, and much critics received on these topics, I would like to talk about a different things that are to my mind very important for being life-long healthy human.

To begin, I want to emphasize that external conditions (e.g. access to health care, crime rates, ecology etc.) are undoubtedly a crucial factor that determines longevity. But it doesn’t mean external conditions are the only factor.

I see at least 4 internal factors (those that are under control) that are very important and still often overlooked. To my opinion they deserve great attention if we want to challenge the current understanding of human life limits.

How we sleep
Average person in a developed country sleeps 25-27 years. Significant amount. But how many of us are really aware of how important the sleep is for our lives?

More often than not we only know some reference information, e.g. “if you sleep more than 8 ours that is risky, scientists say it increases mortality risks”, that is only for conversations, but completely useless for analysis and action. Terms like sleep hygiene are unfamiliar to many of us. We are even unfamiliar with factors that affect sleep.

We look for “tips and tricks”, but don’t try to ask “why” questions and analyze. The irony is we have all information to analyze, but we don’t bother. Thinking that 25 years will not affect the rest 50 years is itself harmful.

How we breathe
Same story. We almost don’t care about the importance of clean air and even less we care about exact ways we breathe. We only know some yoga-like things about the benefits of awareness of breathing.

But breathe is one of the basic movements of our body. How many times a day do you respire? Guess. About 20000 times. Daily. That’s 584400000 times in 80 years! Is it unimportant? It could be if we’ve lived in green paradise.

How we move
We move every minute. We walk, we touch, we talk, we jump, we run, we write, we dance. But the most basic moves we do almost unconsciously. I.e. we know the only one way to do the basic moves. We do the trained moves, that became reflexive after countless repetitions. But we can’t prove that these trained moves are the correct ones — we don’t know any others to compare!

I think there is a vast space for learning here. Learning not only basic moves, but kinesthetic attention, body awareness and dexterity. That’s what I would like to call kinesthetic literacy.

And few words about freedom. Freedom is about having more than one way to do the single thing. If you know only one way you have no freedom. Kinesthetic literacy gives freedom of movement. It is like living a dance.

How we eat
Not what we eat, but how.

• What are you thinking about when you are eating?
• What should you be thinking about?
• Do you watch TV, make phone calls, develop software, listen death metal at 130Db, drive car, run a marathon, talk to 30 people, read books about schizophrenia or do other multitasking while you are eating?
• How do you choose what to eat today, or someone else makes a choice for you?
• Do you work after the meal?

These are not question about “what” but about “how” and they are really important. I’m sure you understand why.

I’m sure learning about these 4 habits and developing them in the direction relevant to our personal unique lives would give us a tremendous advantage of living a healthy lives.

In conclusion I would like to share a links to few books and articles that make sense:

• The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion
• Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating
• The Way We Eat Now – Harvard Magazine
• Master Moves
• The Harvard Medical School Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep (Harvard Medical School Guides)
• Breathe, You Are Alive: The Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing

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There are healthy people in the world, frankly. 

Living healthy is the skill. This skill is learnable like any other skill. Why don’t we teach it all over the world? Is it less important than maths, biology or history?

In recent years great movement had started to encourage children to live healthy: Team for Kids. They are great people and they are making change. But it is obviously not enough. 

What we really need is implementing the concept of healthy school.

Teachers have a permission to talk to children. We should realize that teacher has much more responsibilities than we used to think.

Sometimes I see people talking about health in all seriousness. But very few of them are looking healthy — some are swollen, some are nervous, some are drunk, some are addicted to pills, some are politicians — will you trust their words? Will your children trust their words?

Sometimes I see capmaigns against smoking that are bound to fail, because they are mediocre, with no passion inside.

Children need examples, real-world people, stories. Not slogans. A cancer-fighter life story worth all the slogans together.

Leading photo by rafamerchan

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Of course I wish I were in school. I want to learn to read and write….
But how can I? My mother needs me to get water.

Yeni Bazan, age 10, El Alto, Bolivia. Quote rewritten from HDR2006.

Today I would like to share some water-related facts we should be familiar with.

• Access to water for life is a basic human need and a fundamental human right.
• For almost a century water use has been growing almost twice as fast as population.
• Lack of drinking water is the primary cause of illness and death in the world.
• Every year some 1.8 million children die as a result of diarrhoea and other diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation.
• More than 1 billion people are denied the right to clean water and 2.6 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation.
• In developing countries children often go for water instead going to schools.
• Over the past 50 years, there have been some 37 cases of reported violence between states over water—and most
  of the episodes have involved minor skirmishes.
• The agricultural production to feed the people would be impossible in near future (2050) without wise use of water.
• Millions of the world’s people lack access to safe water not because of scarcity, but because they are locked out by poverty, inequality and government failures.
• By one estimate water purification explains almost half the mortality reduction in the United States in the first third of the 20th century.
• Dripping taps in rich countries lose more water than is available each day to more than 1 billion people.
• Every $1 spent in the water/sanitations sector creates on average another $8 in costs averted and productivity gained.
• Almost half the developing world lacks access to sanitation.
• With support from aid donors, even the poorest countries have the capacity to mobilize the resources to achieve change.
• Viewed at a global level, there is more than enough water to go around and meet all of humanity’s needs.
• Global warming will transform the hydrological patterns that determine the availability of water.
• Combating climate change demands that we place ecological imperatives at the heart of economics.

The facts was quoted from HDR2006, HDR2008, and Veoila Water.

Time to take action is now.

Leading photo by [ Kane ]

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Trying to answer these questions I made some analysis of existing points of view. I would like to share the results.

There is a plenty of existing health care and tracking resources. But mostly they are only providing some means for information retrieval, tools for health/diet tracking, shopping – utilizing only the basic capabilities Internet possesses.

At the same time survey “Future of the Internet” conducted in 2005 by Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that experts expect the radical changes in health care due to Internet in near future.

The main points claimed can be summarized as following:

In 10 years, the increasing use of online medical resources will yield substantial improvement in many of the pervasive problems now facing health care — including rising health care costs, poor customer service, the high prevalence of medical mistakes, malpractice concerns, and lack of access to medical care for many Americans.

Well, probably it won’t completely solve major problems such as lack of access to medical care and Medicare debt problems (you can read more within Wikipedia article on Medicare.)

But still it can be a significant benefit to the society if applied properly.

Here is the top 10 list of improvements:

1. Interconnection between doctors and patients.
   Technically it is already possible to setup a permanent communication system between doctors and patients. The goal of such system is in providing easy access to qualified and personalized medical consultation.The future is in personalization. We all want to be treated in a special way. Don’t we?
2. Decision support.
   Malpractice and various medical mistakes are a big source of trouble. Some of the possible mistakes can certainly be prevented by decision support systems. This can save lives.
3. Record management.
   Well, I think, you know what it is all about. Sadly, current management practices are somewhat inconceivable. While automation is just a part of a game, it still can bring a fresh air of improvement.
4. Integrated shopping.
   The truth is when I’m not sure about drug I see in e-shop/drugstore I want to get advise directly from a trusted personal doctor. Technology can make it a reality.
5. Smooth health tracking.
   Existing health tracking systems imho are not smooth. I mean they require certain actions that sometimes we are too lazy to take.Meanwhile, I can easily imagine the future tracking systems – very small, consuming almost no energy, requiring almost no action, connected to the network, so your doctor can inspect your health remotely.
6. Medical data sharing across the Globe.
   Quite important for travelers – if you are sick, you need to get treatment according to your medical card, not the average treatment. Quite important for remote communities and far-flung regions – to have persistent access to global centralized knowledge base.
7. International standardization.
   Once a decision to invent a global Internet-based health care system will be made, there will be a demand for international standardization. It seems to be reasonable within the globalization framework.Of course it is a double-edged sword, but it obviously has some advantages, especially for developing countries, I think.
8. Hospital automation.
   Mobile robots are considered as one of biggest changes the world will face in a coming decade. And hospital automation is one of major application areas for mobile robotics. There are recently some launches in this field (see article on Robotics Trends for detail.)Robots connected to the network are the next step. It will allow not only automate supply chain automation, but laboratory management, building monitoring, the long-term and short-term resource allocation planning and much more.
9. Self-education resources.
   Data is already here. Frankly, we are overwhelmed with data. But we often don’t have a means to extract relevant information from this data.Searching for health related terms we are probably expecting to see another ugly belly fat loss ad and other distractions (distraction indeed is quite serious issue nowadays, I will write about it in upcoming article “How to Overcome Distraction” – subscribe if you wish to be in touch).
   There is strong demand in a system that will satisfy the major requirements: it should be easy to use and trustworthy.
10. Add the benefit you see for yourself.
    Feel free to join the discussion in comments

The benefits are quite positive. But of course there are significant obstacles for the new technologies to be introduced: insurance companies and overall bureaucracy, privacy risks, bad data producing even worse results, lack of investments etc.

After all, the major problem is formulated in the name “paid medical service”. It is paid, so – regardless of the technologies – there always will be people who need medication but can not afford it.

At the same time United Nations convention states:

The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.

(Check out “The right to the highest attainable standard of health” at UN Human Rights website if you don’t believe me.)

Here we have some divergence, don’t we?

For further information consider reading articles: The Future of the Internet in Health Care, Healthcare and the Internet, Healthcare on the Internet and above mentioned report.

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