Right Hand Vs. Left Hand: Who's Healthier?
Now, here's a tricky question. Do you suppose your health is
related to your natural handedness tendencies? This is a
question that has actually been studied and reviewed by member
of the medical field, and to the best of their ability, there is
no conclusive evidence that your natural handedness tendencies
has anything to do with your state of health, or your
disposition to any particular state of health.
Our overall state of health is dependent upon several factors:
our diet, our exercise, our work habits, and our genetics. The
first three contributors cross all natural tendency of
handedness lines, and we find we have all forms of handedness in
all sort of occupations, with all sorts of eating habits, and
exercise habits. When you talk about our genetic disposition,
you really have to understand that as a person, we received
input from two parents: a mother and a father. While it is true
that we normally take many of our traits from our parents, our
natural tendency for handedness can come from as far back as a
great-grandparent.
Our health is the culmination of inherited possibilities, and
daily consistencies. We might inherit the potential for heart
disease, but if we live a life of good eating habits, good
exercise habits, and attend to nutritional and rest
requirements; we can often overcome the inherited potential. We
can glean some information from what has been learned about
natural handedness tendencies to make some assumptions about a
person's personality traits that might contribute to the overall
health of the individual, but nothing that can be tied directly
to the "handedness" of the individual.
First of all, there is only about 10% of the population that
is left-handed. Now, if you're trying to conduct research, on
any topic, you need a more even distribution of subject matter.
If 90% of our population is right-handed, there is no way to get
a proper perspective on comparative features.
The explanations of right-handed versus left-handed are still
very vague generalizations, and no one group has been able to
successfully explain why we are one way or the other. Since we
aren't even able to agree on the reasons for the existence of a
preference, how could we possibly study the health of one group
versus the other, and come up with any usable information?
What we can determine are some general characteristics of one
versus the other, and draw "generalizations" from that
information. Most often, left-handed people are less cautious
than right-handed counterparts, leading us to assume that there
are more health-risks for the less cautious. Second, there is
the belief that left-handed people are more creative, more
extroverted than right-handers; this would lead us to assume
that again, left-handed people are more exposed to opportunities
for ill-health or accidents. In all of this generalization
however, there is this fact: there are more left-handed women
than men, and women tend to live longer than men. This evidence
simply throws all other generalizations into a quandary. Does
our handedness affect our health, I think not.