So given that i'm flying out of the country tomorrow, I decided to suck it up and go to the Apple store this evening to try to get an answer for what was going on with my phone and the health app. Was previously avoiding this b/c i was assuming the stores in NYC would be a mad-house still with the iPhone6 rush. And I was right. Even with a reserved Genius Bar appointment at 4:40pm today, I had to wait in line a good 40 mins past my appointment time. Ugh. Anyways, I expected the wait... and Apple staff was very courteous as always.
So here's the deal - the solve for this problem is to do a full restore of the phone, and do NOT restore from a backup. Instead, restore and set it up as a new phone.
(yes this means you lose your settings and data.... so make sure u have things backed up elsewhere, or that you're ok with losing it all!)
Full story: After troubleshooting and asking me questions for 10 mins, and running a diagnostic test on my phone, the Genius Bar guy assigned to me hypothesized that if there was indeed something wrong with my Health app (ie. software not hardware), then b/c i was restoring from a backup, i was simply restoring back the bad files. ie. something in the back up was corrupt. Fortunately, i knew i had a full encrypted backup from last night safely stored on my iMac at home, so i let him have at it, and wipe the phone and start it up as a new phone. And presto, the Health app started working immediately! He couldn't explain why/what the corrupted file was, but his hypothesis was right.
Unfortunately, i wasn't sure if i had backed up all my other data elsewhere (eg. i knew I hadn't synced my pics on my phone with iPhoto in a looooong time), and i have a few apps, where i have stored data (like a fitness app) and i didn't want to lose that yet. So when I got home, I ended up resetting it again, and restoring from my back up to get all my data/settings back. Health app still isn't working, but at least now i know what the solve is. Since i'll be away for the next 2 weeks, i think i'm going to leave my phone as is for now. I hope maybe Apple will issue another iOS update or something that magically restores this strange bug. If not, then i guess when i'll return, i'll have to deal with this, and decide if restoring as a new phone is what i want to do.
So that's my story. I hope this info helps all you other guys struggling with the same problem. Good luck!
PS - forgot to add that this was an iPhone 5s that i purchased at launch last year... which if you do the math, means my 1-yr warranty is almost up! in fact, i have less than a week left on it, so that was the other reason i really wanted to get to the store today to make sure there wasn't a hardware issue with the phone itself.
