Column: ”Life as a F1 race”
When a Formula 1 racing car runs a race, it has thousands of sensors that track everything from the temperature of the tires to the pressure in the pistons. Everything is read in real time by a team that can give feedback to the driver and plan the next pit stop. The race is not just about driving as fast as possible, but really enduring the whole race. Sometimes it can be worthwhile to go in and change the tires in order to drive faster.
Man is like a Formula 1 car, a very complicated machine. The F1 car makes several pit stops during a race and during a lifetime the human being may also have to come in several times for maintenance. But unlike a Formula 1 car, we wait until something breaks. There may be some planned stops where we run checks, but usually they are few.
The body's built-in sensors that measure combinations of values give us feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, fatigue, positive or negative energy. These sensors are important and give us a continuous update of our status. However, they sometimes live their own lives and are connected to a decision-making system that can also have dubious motives. We like to eat sweet, salty and fatty treats when we feel hungry and sometimes they just go down when a glass of water would have been better. Our brain can then sometimes take control and override the sensors' signals. It can be good, but not infrequently it is social factors that ultimately get a veto, how one should look or how one should behave.
A scientific area that is completely exploding is readings of different values in the body. Height and weight have long been the main parameters. Many people today have a watch, a bracelet or ring that can read pulse and different types of activities. If you have diabetes, you can be one of those who have access to continuous glucose and ketone measurement connected to an app in the mobile phone giving you an indication of when and how much insulin you need. Furthermore, there are technologies to measure and analyze many more variables, so that the body can run the race as quickly as possible.
Life as an F1 car is not easy. If you want to keep the race going, it can be good to keep track of your sensors and the values they give. There are many values we can measure and ways to analyze them. You can do a lot yourself, and now that healthcare is under high pressure, it can be a way to make ends meet. By taking readings of measurement values continuously, we can prevent and detect diseases in time. It can both save lives and increase the quality of life.
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