For most people, feeling well is reassurance enough. No pain, no dizziness, no unusual fatigue, no reason to see a doctor. Life continues, work gets done and the thought of checking blood pressure, blood sugar or cholesterol can easily be pushed to another day.
However, a new survey suggests that this very feeling of being healthy could be keeping many people from checking whether they actually are.
The Know Your Numbers survey, commissioned by Doctors for Healthy Living (D4HL) and conducted by Ipsos Kenya, found that among 1,100 connected working adults surveyed, feeling healthy was by far the biggest reason given for not undergoing recent health checks.
Seventy-two per cent of respondents who had not recently tested said they did not do so because they felt healthy.
It is a finding that exposes a familiar contradiction in preventive healthcare. People may know what they should be checking, yet still see no urgency in doing it when nothing feels wrong.
The survey found relatively high awareness of some of the basic indicators used to assess the risk of non-communicable diseases. Nine in 10 respondents, or 90 per cent, were aware of blood pressure, while 78 per cent knew about blood sugar.
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Awareness of body mass index, or BMI, stood at 66 per cent, followed by cholesterol at 63 per cent but when it came to waist circumference, awareness dropped sharply to just 25 per cent. Knowing about a health indicator, however, did not necessarily mean having it checked.
Nearly four in five respondents, 79 per cent, said they had had their blood pressure measured at some point, while 59 per cent had checked their BMI, height or weight but only 47 per cent had ever tested their blood sugar, 15 per cent had tested cholesterol and just nine per cent had ever checked their waist circumference.
The numbers became even smaller when respondents were asked about more recent testing. Within the previous three months, only 28 per cent reported having tested their blood sugar, seven per cent had checked cholesterol and five per cent had measured their waist circumference.
The result, according to the researchers, points to a problem that goes beyond whether people have heard of these health indicators. The challenge is turning that knowledge into a routine health behaviour.
The survey found that 45 per cent of respondents said they understood what the indicators meant for their health “very well”, while another 45 per cent said they understood them “fairly well”. Yet that apparent understanding was not consistently translating into action.
Dr Robert Mathenge, Co-Founder of Doctors for Healthy Living, says the problem lies partly in the assumption that feeling well is evidence that nothing is wrong.
“One of the biggest challenges in preventive healthcare is that many people equate feeling healthy with being healthy,” he said.
That distinction matters because conditions such as hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol may develop without obvious symptoms, allowing health risks to progress unnoticed while a person continues with their normal life.
“While feeling well is important, conditions such as hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and even cancer, can develop without obvious symptoms,” Mathenge said.
The survey offers another glimpse into how this reactive approach to healthcare persists. Lack of time was cited by 18 per cent of respondents as a reason for not testing recently, while 12 per cent pointed to inconvenient timing and 10 per cent to cost but none came close to the 72 per cent who simply felt healthy.
In other words, for many respondents, the barrier was not necessarily the absence of a hospital, money or time. It was the absence of a perceived reason to go.
That mindset could have consequences as Kenya confronts a growing burden of non-communicable diseases. The conditions covered by the survey, including hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular risks and obesity, are often associated with long-term complications when they remain undetected or poorly managed.
The survey also revealed a gender dimension, with women reporting higher awareness and stronger testing behaviour than men across most of the indicators. Yet feeling healthy remained the leading reason for not testing among both men and women, suggesting that the deeper problem may be less about gender and more about how health checks are perceived.
For D4HL, the answer is to make preventive healthcare less of an occasional decision and more of a routine part of everyday life.
“Knowing your numbers should become as routine as servicing your car or renewing your insurance,” said Anthony Mugo, Head of Partnerships at Doctors for Healthy Living.
The survey suggests there may also be opportunities to take screening beyond the traditional hospital setting. While private hospitals and clinics were the preferred locations for routine screening for most respondents, public health facilities were also highly preferred. Pharmacies, despite being among the health facilities people frequently interact with, were less commonly identified as preferred screening locations.
Workplaces, too, emerged as a potential avenue for turning good intentions into action. With most of the survey participants being economically active, the researchers argue that employers could help normalise routine screening by making it easier and more convenient for workers to access health checks.
Perhaps the most important lesson from the survey is simpler. A person does not have to feel sick to have a reason to know their health numbers.
The survey was conducted among 1,100 connected working individuals, with 61.6 per cent aged between 25 and 34 and 28 per cent aged between 35 and 44. Nairobi accounted for 41.1 per cent of the sample, while 63.2 per cent lived in urban areas, 25.6 per cent in peri-urban areas and 11.2 per cent in rural areas. The findings therefore describe the behaviour of this particular surveyed population rather than every Kenyan.
Still, the central finding presents a question that is difficult to ignore, if feeling healthy is the reason most people give for not checking their health, how much could be discovered simply by looking before something feels wrong?
“Knowing and monitoring your key health indicators is, therefore, one of the simplest and most effective ways of taking charge of your health,” Mathenge says.
Sometimes, the absence of symptoms is reassuring but it is not necessarily proof that everything is fine.