Right Hand Vs. Left Hand: Who’s Healthier?
December 2nd, 2008

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.

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