“If you are having a stroke, there is about a 9 percent chance you will be misdiagnosed in the ER — a statistic that applies to all age groups when the patient is seen initially in the ER. But if you are young, female, a person of color or have limited education (less than a high school degree), your risk of misdiagnosis soars,” according to one expert cited in this article from the Washington Post. For women, apparently, that risk is a whopping 30% higher than the norm.

Money has everything and nothing to do with health. It’s a leading indicator of life expectancy, it can keep people on life support medical equipment for days, weeks, months and years, it can pay premiums, doctors, hospitals and pharmacies, but in our system of healthcare, it can’t buy the things that work best at keeping people healthy. Adding insult to injury, the way you think of your own health likely has little to do with how your specialist, insurance company and perhaps even your regular doctor or nurse sees you.

What is health? How do you know when you have it, and when you don’t? Do measures of health really capture what it is? How do people from around the world and from other periods of time think of health?