When Alisha (name changed on request), 48, went to a wellness retreat last year, she was looking to relax and blow off some stress, perhaps come back with a healthy habit or two. She considered herself relatively healthy, and used a smartwatch to track fitness. When the retreat prescribed assessments, she went ahead with them as part of the protocol.

Among the blood tests and other checks was a VO2 max test, where she exercised on a treadmill or cycle while wearing a mask to measure her cardiorespiratory fitness. Her result put her in the “poor” category. “They did explain the test to me and told me why I fell towards the bottom of it. They didn’t scare me, but I got worried considering my family’s poor heart history.”

Once home, she did what most would do: she Googled it. What she read added to her stress and she shared a complete set of reports to her family doctor. He had treated her since childhood, knew her family history and reassured that there was no immediate cause for concern.

His advise was straightforward - exercise and build up your heart rate with HIIT gradually. No further investigations and no medicines were needed. A year later, Alisha exercises regularly and is well. “I realise now that my stress was unfounded. Sometimes, less information can be more,” she says.

Wellness now comes with a score

Alisha’s experience is an increasingly easy one to have. Glucose, hormones, vitamin levels, heart-rate variability, sleep stages, biological age, genetic predispositions—the amount of medical-style information a person can now generate without actually feeling unwell is extraordinary. Current research suggests that much of today’s self-tracking centres around exercise and cardiovascular fitness, sleep and recovery, and increasingly metabolic health.

Wellness tools to track these can include anything from a smartwatch measuring sleep and heart-rate variability, a smart ring producing a recovery score, and a gym testing VO2 max or body composition, to a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) showing your blood glucose levels, and a retreat clinic offering detailed blood work, hormone panels, genomic testing and biological-age assessments.

Fitness has become increasingly quantified, from race times and training zones to the scores and statistics shared after events such as Hyrox. For an otherwise healthy person, these scores can often change the way they think about their health - and send them straight to the doctor.

Wellness retreats offering this kind of testing are aware that an unexpected result can have that effect. Dr Vishnuraj Prakash, Head of Ayurveda and Functional Medicine at Tulåh Clinical Wellness in Keralam, says guests can become worried when confronted with unfamiliar data or a result outside an expected range. “A single ‘poor’ or ‘suboptimal’ result is not treated as a diagnosis; we look for patterns across multiple markers,” he says.

Not every test needs to be done

Dr Arpit Bansal, a Prayagraj-based cancer surgeon and longevity expert, says his approach to preventive testing is about understanding “the direction they are travelling in”. Among the markers he considers useful are HbA1c (average blood sugar over the past few months), fasting insulin, a lipid panel including ApoB (a marker of the number of potentially artery-clogging particles), high-sensitivity CRP (a marker of low-grade inflammation), vitamin D, B12, ferritin and thyroid levels. His test for whether any biomarker is worth measuring comes down to three questions: “Can I change it? Does changing it change outcomes? And does it tell me something my body is not already telling me?”

For Mumbai-based foundational medicine and lifestyle expert Luke Coutinho, the starting point is equally important. “If you’ve got symptoms, a diagnosed condition, family history, or real risk factors, testing matters. Same with the screenings your doctor actually recommends for your age,” he says. What he worries about is “ordering every panel on the menu because someone packaged it as an ‘optimisation bundle’.”

Before doing a test, Coutinho suggests asking why you are doing it, what the result will tell you and, most importantly, whether it will change what you do next. He is increasingly wary of the word ‘suboptimal’.

He has seen people change entire routines in response to a result they did not completely understand. His advice is not to dismiss an unexpected number, but to find out whether it is clinically significant, whether it needs repeating and how it fits with the person’s age, history and overall risk.

When the data matters

While healthy people are guilty of tracking everything and falling into the anxiety trap, wearable tech can actually benefit those who have pre-existing conditions. In 2021, Aditya Shah’s mother Harshada, then 63, had undergone several procedures for blockages in her arteries. After an angiography and angioplasty around 2019, Shah decided she should wear a smartwatch, partly because its ECG function could flag irregular heart rhythms. In early 2021, Harshada woke up one morning feeling unwell. Shah says his mother was inclined to brush it off, but this time the watch also flagged something unusual about her heart rhythm. They recorded an ECG on the device and sent the PDF to her cardiologist over WhatsApp.

“He immediately looked at it and said go to the ER,” says Shah. He recalls one of the doctors telling the family that bringing her in when they did had saved her from an almost-certain heart attack. Shah has since bought watches for himself and his father, too.

What happens after the report

For Alisha, the answer to that question was reassuringly simple. She exercised more, but didn’t start medication, undergo another set of investigations or acquire a diagnosis she hadn’t had before. Harshada’s data, in contrast, contributed to a decision to seek urgent medical attention in someone who already had a serious cardiac history.

Between those two experiences sits much of the debate around preventive wellness. A bigger report does not automatically make a better one. “There’s a line between being ‘health-conscious’ and slipping into becoming ‘health-anxious,’ and it is thinner than most people think,” says Coutinho. “Run enough tests and you will eventually find something outside the reference range, even in someone who’s perfectly healthy. Then that leads to more tests, more interventions, more money, and more worry over something that was never a real problem to begin with.”

Anushka Patodia is an independent journalist from Mumbai.

When Alisha (name changed on request), 48, went to a wellness retreat last year, she was looking to relax and blow off some stress, perhaps come back with a healthy habit or two. She considered herself relatively healthy, and used a smartwatch to track fitness. When the retreat prescribed assessments, she went ahead with them as part of the protocol.

Among the blood tests and other checks was a VO2 max test, where she exercised on a treadmill or cycle while wearing a mask to measure her cardiorespiratory fitness. Her result put her in the “poor” category. “They did explain the test to me and told me why I fell towards the bottom of it. They didn’t scare me, but I got worried considering my family’s poor heart history.”

Once home, she did what most would do: she Googled it. What she read added to her stress and she shared a complete set of reports to her family doctor. He had treated her since childhood, knew her family history and reassured that there was no immediate cause for concern.

His advise was straightforward - exercise and build up your heart rate with HIIT gradually. No further investigations and no medicines were needed. A year later, Alisha exercises regularly and is well. “I realise now that my stress was unfounded. Sometimes, less information can be more,” she says.

Wellness now comes with a score

Alisha’s experience is an increasingly easy one to have. Glucose, hormones, vitamin levels, heart-rate variability, sleep stages, biological age, genetic predispositions—the amount of medical-style information a person can now generate without actually feeling unwell is extraordinary. Current research suggests that much of today’s self-tracking centres around exercise and cardiovascular fitness, sleep and recovery, and increasingly metabolic health.

Wellness tools to track these can include anything from a smartwatch measuring sleep and heart-rate variability, a smart ring producing a recovery score, and a gym testing VO2 max or body composition, to a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) showing your blood glucose levels, and a retreat clinic offering detailed blood work, hormone panels, genomic testing and biological-age assessments.

Fitness has become increasingly quantified, from race times and training zones to the scores and statistics shared after events such as Hyrox. For an otherwise healthy person, these scores can often change the way they think about their health - and send them straight to the doctor.

Wellness retreats offering this kind of testing are aware that an unexpected result can have that effect. Dr Vishnuraj Prakash, Head of Ayurveda and Functional Medicine at Tulåh Clinical Wellness in Keralam, says guests can become worried when confronted with unfamiliar data or a result outside an expected range. “A single ‘poor’ or ‘suboptimal’ result is not treated as a diagnosis; we look for patterns across multiple markers,” he says.

Not every test needs to be done

Dr Arpit Bansal, a Prayagraj-based cancer surgeon and longevity expert, says his approach to preventive testing is about understanding “the direction they are travelling in”. Among the markers he considers useful are HbA1c (average blood sugar over the past few months), fasting insulin, a lipid panel including ApoB (a marker of the number of potentially artery-clogging particles), high-sensitivity CRP (a marker of low-grade inflammation), vitamin D, B12, ferritin and thyroid levels. His test for whether any biomarker is worth measuring comes down to three questions: “Can I change it? Does changing it change outcomes? And does it tell me something my body is not already telling me?”

For Mumbai-based foundational medicine and lifestyle expert Luke Coutinho, the starting point is equally important. “If you’ve got symptoms, a diagnosed condition, family history, or real risk factors, testing matters. Same with the screenings your doctor actually recommends for your age,” he says. What he worries about is “ordering every panel on the menu because someone packaged it as an ‘optimisation bundle’.”

Before doing a test, Coutinho suggests asking why you are doing it, what the result will tell you and, most importantly, whether it will change what you do next. He is increasingly wary of the word ‘suboptimal’.

He has seen people change entire routines in response to a result they did not completely understand. His advice is not to dismiss an unexpected number, but to find out whether it is clinically significant, whether it needs repeating and how it fits with the person’s age, history and overall risk.

When the data matters

While healthy people are guilty of tracking everything and falling into the anxiety trap, wearable tech can actually benefit those who have pre-existing conditions. In 2021, Aditya Shah’s mother Harshada, then 63, had undergone several procedures for blockages in her arteries. After an angiography and angioplasty around 2019, Shah decided she should wear a smartwatch, partly because its ECG function could flag irregular heart rhythms. In early 2021, Harshada woke up one morning feeling unwell. Shah says his mother was inclined to brush it off, but this time the watch also flagged something unusual about her heart rhythm. They recorded an ECG on the device and sent the PDF to her cardiologist over WhatsApp.

“He immediately looked at it and said go to the ER,” says Shah. He recalls one of the doctors telling the family that bringing her in when they did had saved her from an almost-certain heart attack. Shah has since bought watches for himself and his father, too.

What happens after the report

For Alisha, the answer to that question was reassuringly simple. She exercised more, but didn’t start medication, undergo another set of investigations or acquire a diagnosis she hadn’t had before. Harshada’s data, in contrast, contributed to a decision to seek urgent medical attention in someone who already had a serious cardiac history.

Between those two experiences sits much of the debate around preventive wellness. A bigger report does not automatically make a better one. “There’s a line between being ‘health-conscious’ and slipping into becoming ‘health-anxious,’ and it is thinner than most people think,” says Coutinho. “Run enough tests and you will eventually find something outside the reference range, even in someone who’s perfectly healthy. Then that leads to more tests, more interventions, more money, and more worry over something that was never a real problem to begin with.”

Anushka Patodia is an independent journalist from Mumbai.