Dr Vonda Wright has emphasised the need to prioritise health well before reaching retirement age, following a discovery from The Diary of a CEO podcast host Steven Bartlett. In their discussion, the 31-year-old businessman told the doctor that he had researched into the average ages when people are most likely to get a potentially deadly disease, such as; heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as well as breast and prostate cancers.
With this, he weighed the data up with the amount of people that die from each of those diseases and, as a result, he found that “62.94 years old is the exact age” when a person is likely to be diagnosed with one of those health issues.
Dr Wright, who is also an orthopaedic sports medicine surgeon, confirmed the accuracy of this data and stressed why being aware of any health issues early is important. She explained: “Those are when they manifest, you may have them before then, maybe you never knew it.
“I have people say to me when I ask them their health history, ‘What medical problems do you have?’ and they’re like, ‘I don’t have any’. Only because they’ve never been to a doctor.
“Or, maybe they’ve been diagnosed but they haven’t gotten so bad that they’re not spending three days a week in the doctor’s office, or maybe they are sick.
“Those three categories right, but your chat GPT data is correct, that is when it shows up.”
Issuing a warning, she continued: “That corresponds to when the average person retires.
“So, just when you start thinking you have time to live the life that you envision, you’re saddled with health problems that you have not taken care of.”
Stressing how illnesses could potentially be prevented or saved early, the doctor shared that your 40s is the decade where “you need to get it together” health-wise.
“Whatever the circumstances are, between 40 and 63, you have time to course-correct, but if you decide at 63 to pay attention, it is much harder,” she explained.
Dr. Wright, who has spent her 20+ year medical career working to change the way we view and treat the aging process, went on to say why she is on a mission to do just that.
She added: “[It’s] to not only take care of people in my middle-aged demographic, but to really get to my millennial children and my millennial nieces and nephews and say, ‘You have so much control of your health if you just look up and pay attention’.”
Elaborating on how you can increase your health span, the doctor said it all stems from your childhood.
“It begins with what we teach our children,” she explained. “I hear parents a lot of times who say, ‘Oh, my kid won’t eat this or that’ and ‘I can’t get my kid to do anything’.
“I’m not scolding them in the way that I’m about to respond, I get it, I’m the mother of a family of six blended children, but here’s what I know… children learn from what they see. The time to begin is when our children are little.”
Dr Wright went on to say that ages 35 to 45 is also the “critical decade” to fully focus on your health and listen to your body.