Nobody ever wakes up thinking about your next 30 years of health. Well, nobody but you. Agentic health is the ecosystem built on the premise that good health and extended healthspan (healthy years) are largely in your hands. Not just through your lifestyle choices, but also in how you exercise patient advocacy, communicate with your doctors, keep track of your metrics, choose your preventative and diagnostic procedures and coordinate all the moving parts of a healthy life.
We are living through a genuine healthcare shift.
Reactive vs Proactive
Traditionally, healthcare is reactive, not proactive. Example: you will usually only see a doctor when there is something visibly wrong with your health. The doctor will try to fix it, usually with specific medicine. Unfortunately, once these treatable symptoms show up, chances are the cause of them has been sitting inside you for ages already, and their treatment might be complicated and even permanent. That’s a reactive approach. Had you had access to all the tools of preventative and diagnostic care, you might have stopped the symptoms before they ever caused a real problem. That’s preventative.
Our healthcare systems are designed for treating and not preventing. And although policy makers are trying to now shift course towards prevention, it’s a slow moving ship. If you want to focus on increasing healthspan and overall wellbeing, you are going to have to take matters into your own hands.
Taking agency over your healthcare starts well outside any lab: it’s your lifestyle that needs a careful look. How you eat, sleep, move is important, but so is how you maintain friendships and live with a purpose. Minor improvements in these areas have surprisingly big shifts in wellbeing and overall health. As Dr Casey Means, author of Good Energy says, if walking were a pill it would be the most impactful pill we’ve ever had in modern medicine.
Agentic Tech
There’s more good news. The growing agentic tech side makes healthcare more measurable, more efficient and more accessible to the lay person (you!) than ever before. We can now measure biometrics with our wearables, have regular blood tests that benchmark and track, supplement with well-formulated products, and of course use AI-enhanced tools for a myriad of uses, such as turning our health data into personalised dashboards.
Co-ordination
You also need to close the loop. Your responsibility extends to coordinating all the moving parts that make up your healthcare system: making sure all your doctors are well informed of relevant data, that you receive maximum cover from your medical aid plan, that you ask the right questions and explore all options and that you learn to navigate the system within the constraints of regulation, access and funding.
Effectively, we can empower our own personal agency with agentic tools, and increase not just the years we’re alive, but the number of years we live in good health. Without our agency, tech becomes something that “the system” manages. On the other hand, without the agentic tech, our own personal agency becomes overwhelming. This is the perfect combo then: human and machine intelligence, aimed at the same goal – more good, healthy years. That’s agentic health.
Make no mistake: agentic health is no small obligation. But as with most difficult yet worthwhile endeavours, you get there slowly, step by step. You just need to start, and to commit. The payoff is immense: not only are you likely to live healthier for longer, you will also live healthier soon. That means more energy, which in turn translates into more fun, better moods and purer joy. And you can start with my help. I think, write and speak about agentic health, and break it down into simple, actionable steps.
Start here:
I send my always-free The Daily Shift to your inbox every morning at 5:55am. Read it first-thing, and you will have the tools to pursue agentic health, and all the motivation and support to stay on the journey.