Odds

You know. The lifetime odds of a male being diagnosed with some heart disease or having some related incident are 1 in 2. Seems like with a 50% chance, no matter what you do it doesn't matter. Especially since the odds of dying of cancer are also something like 1 in 2. So you either get cancer or you have a heart attack or heart failure.

Yes, this is all very morbid but somehow liberating. Not that I'm giving up on getting better but somehow, I have to find a way to stop caring so much. I read a very interesting article yesterday about hypochondria. There was an extremely interesting point about the difference between hypochondriacs and 'normal' people:


Interestingly, research suggests that people with hypochondriasis make more realistic estimations of their risk of disease than most people, and in fact underestimate their risk of illness. Most people simply underestimate their risk even more.


In other words, we (hypochondriacs) actually are more realistic in our estimation of the chance of disease than most people. Even though we underestimate the true odds.

Here's the link to the above article