Written by Patrick Massey, M,D., Ph.D. Healthcare expenses need to be reduced by exercise, stress reduction, diet changes, sleep, weight loss, vitamins, sometimes supplements, and occasional detoxification therapy.
What do saving the environment and saving health care have in common? Actually, quite a lot.
Last week, I attended a medical symposium at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The symposium was the brainchild of David Rakel, M.D., director of integrative medicine for the university. It was titled “Green Medicine: Healthy People, Healthy Planet.” The keynote speaker, Dr. Karl-Heinrich Robert (pronounced ro bear), emphasized that health care should be “green,” leave a very small environmental foot print and, most important, be sustainable.
Sustainability means we don’t use resources to the point of depletion — that there is enough left over to regenerate. Sustainability affects everything, especially cost and availability. For example, demand for mahogany wood leads to cutting down more trees. As the rate at which trees are cut down exceeds the growth of new trees, supply drops. That drives up price and accelerates the cutting of remaining trees. At some point, mahogany trees are gone.
Health care is no different.
Rising costs are the result of an unsustainable product with increasing demand. The product is medical services and medications. Demand is caused by the current medical approach of managing disease.
As with the mahogany trees, using less health care will lower cost and increase availability.
Too much money is spent by physicians ordering tests to prevent malpractice lawsuits. Too much money is spent on treating disease rather than promoting health. We spend more on health care than any other country and yet the Commonwealth Fund ranked our health care last among six advanced industrialized nations. This system is simply not sustainable — and we know it.
The only answer to a sustainable medical system is health. We know what it takes to be healthy. Daily exercise, stress reduction, vegetable-based dietary changes, sleep, weight loss, vitamins, sometimes supplements and the occasional detoxification therapy lead to lifelong health and a sustainable medical system.
The problem is we have been led to believe that disease is not our fault and that our destiny is irreversibly written by genetic and other factors that predispose us to illness. We accept as true that the only solution to our illnesses is an ever increasing number of medications and therapies. Almost all disease, to a significant degree, is a lifestyle choice. Heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic pain, dementia and even some cancers are strongly linked to lifestyle.
Just as we are responsible for a sustainable world, we too are responsible for a sustainable medical system. Demanding health rather than simply settling for disease management is a great start.
Posted November 19, 2008.
