There’s a familiar character in modern medicine: the perfect patient. The person who does everything “right.” They eat sensibly, exercise regularly, avoid obvious vices, keep up with screenings, floss every day, and keep a close social circle. Public health campaigns, wellness apps, and risk calculators implicitly promise that if you check the boxes, you can (more or less) bargain with fate. The perfect patient is the kind of person guidelines are written for, and the rest of us are graded against.
And yet most of us can think of people whose lives flat‑out defy the script. There’s the marathon runner…
