Jeff Caplan: How to predict if you’re going to die

If you can remember when the doctor was a kindly old fellow with a stethoscope — who hardly ever ordered tests — a just-released study might warm your heart.

It’s vindication for that kindly neighborhood doctor who used to listen to you breathe and shine a flashlight in your ear. Then he’d scratch his head, and lean into his years of experience to tell you what’s wrong. He’d make house calls! He’d give you a prescription to fix the problem and then he’d charge you $10.

Decades later, when you have a sniffle, your doctor might order a COVID test, a blood test, and a chest x-ray, and if you’re lucky, the bill’s only $500.

But hang on.

This newly-released study shows that the old neighborhood doctor who’d bang on your knee with a hammer might have been on to something! A Brazilian researcher has written a peer-reviewed study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, claiming that one simple test will reveal the chance that you’ll live for another 10 years. Here’s the test:

Stand on one leg.

That’s it.

In a world full of CT scans and MRIs, if you’re older than 50, and if you can’t stand on one leg for 10 seconds… you’re twice as likely to die within 10 years.

This very minute, you can give yourself a new lease on life with a test that costs ZERO dollars.

Jeff Caplan is the host of Jeff Caplan’s Afternoon News on KSL NewsRadio. You can hear his “My Minute of News” each weekday between 3 and 7 p.m.