Feeling sluggish all the time?

4/04/2014 03:00:00 PM
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Perhaps you should ask your doctor for a blood count:
It turns out that hemoglobin levels are one of the most significant determinants of how healthy people feel.
This is just a sneak peak at some of the research I'm doing. I found this relationship particularly striking because of how dramatic and consistent the correlation is. Hemoglobin are the molecules in your red blood cells that carry oxygen to all the cells in the body. If your hemoglobin levels are low, your body isn't getting enough oxygen, causing you to feel fatigued and weak all the time, eventually leading to very serious complications.

Of course, the graph above has a flip side. If you aren't feeling sluggish, then perhaps you should see if you can donate blood. Often, the treatment for low hemoglobin levels is transfusion, which we can only do if there's enough donor blood available. The treatment is not only life-saving, but also quite dramatic with patients often bouncing back rather quickly from near-vegetables to healthy and active within hours. I'd argue that few, if any, procedures have a qualy-to-cost ratio this high. In terms of redistributing health, your blood is quite possibly more valuable than all the taxes you pay--although, "redistribution" isn't the right word because your own body will have regenerated all the lost blood by the end of the day, so that while you make someone else much better off, donating blood has negligible effects on yourself.