The medical advances we are becoming aware of allow us to live many more years, as we can now respond to diseases that were previously almost impossible to deal with. This is something that people should evaluate their health better, but the reality is that the latest data published by the INE and the Ministry of Health indicate that only 68.3% of the population rates their health as good or very good, which represents a decrease of 5.8 points compared to 2023.
previous This is quite relevant, since we have to go back to 1987 to find similar data, which puts us at the lowest level in nearly four decades. And it is something that we should consider that there are various factors, beyond being able to attack a disease, that make our health seem of poor quality.
social gap. Common falls affect all age groups, but it does not hit everyone equally, as official data shows that falls have a strong gender component. This can be seen because the positive perception among men decreased by 4.4 points, standing at 73.6%. On the other hand, the drop among women was 7.1 points, remaining 63.1%.
If we stick to regionalism, the communities whose population perceives that they have poor health are Galicia (61.6%), Canary Islands (63.8%) and Asturias (65.1%). But looking at the list reveals the real abyss, as for women, 74.4% of people in the highest social class declare that they are in good health, compared to only 55.9% in the lowest social class.
Doubt. These data are not entirely objective, as it may seem that asking someone “how are you feeling” is a highly subjective and unscientific indicator compared to a blood test. But a study published here in 1997 demonstrated that self-rated health is an independent predictor of mortality.
That is, it depends on how healthy we believe; Predicts mortality better than many medical records. Thus, the study concluded that those who rated their health as “poor” had practically double the risk of death compared to those who rated it as “excellent.”
Some nuance. What we saw with this data was that the rate of people reporting chronic diseases increased from 57.7% to 66.2%. And the truth is that it’s a bit strange that he got so sick and so fast in just 24 months, so the answer may lie in how the data was collected, since the surveys were done in person and online in 2023. But in the last version, the system is also accompanied by an online interview.
In this sense, we found that people report better physical and mental health when they talk face-to-face or on the phone than when they fill out a form on the Internet. In sociology it’s called “social desirability” because we tend to hide our pain from other people, but we’re brutally honest in front of a cold screen.
Picture | Gustavo Fring
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