Sustainability and Health Care: What's the Green Connection?

A good place to start when it comes to understanding the integral relationship between health care and sustainability starts with understanding sustainability. On a very simplistic level we can understand it as the human population living in such a way that doesn't prevent or inhibit future generations from meeting their needs.

Ironically, one of the very systems that's been put into place to help keep us healthy and thriving—our country's current health care system--isn't so good for us or the diversity of life throughout the world. Fiscally, it's unsustainable too. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, selling insurance separately to each of the country's millions of employers wastes at least $64 billion in underwriting, sales commissions, marketing and billing costs alone. And thanks to sky-high insurance premiums and health care costs, many of our country's citizens (with many of them unemployed in our current economic climate) simply can't afford medical care, period.

One of the biggest questions we must ask ourselves is: when citizens don't have access to emergency and preventative medical services, how can we as a human population rise up and think beyond our medical concerns to tackle something as big as climate change?

Obama's Health Care Reform: One Step Greener

Obama seems to agree that medical access for all is needed, at least for now. The big cheese is busy trying to make a revolutionary reform to our current health care system, proposing that we shift away from privatized insurance plans to a nation-wide public insurance plan option that intends to drive down health care and insurance costs so that every American has the chance to receive affordable medical attention.

Regardless of whether Obama is thinking green, he's moving in the right direction.

Without medical care it's far too easy—and our cultural DNA far too habituated—to reach for the nearest, most convenient fix.

Let's take the example of a young, working-class citizen without health insurance who has a constant dull pain penetrating their foot. They can't afford skipping work so they reach for the nearest, cheapest pain-killer—even if that fix comes in a plastic, over-packaged bottle, contains hard-to-pronounce ingredients, touts sometimes life-threatening side effects and then makes its way into our waterways where it bio-accumulates in sometimes endangered marine life after they urinate it out. 

Not very green.

Then imagine this very same self-medicating, suffering person being able to receive medical attention whereby their isolated pain could be surgically removed or cured with a small prescription so they could avoid long-term over-the-counter drug use that pays a heavy toll on the environment.

I urge cynics of the public insurance plan to ask, isn't health a birthright—not a privilege for only a few? And then recognize its integral role in helping mitigate the often excessive self-medicating taking place in our very own red, white and blue.

Just Say No to Prescription Drugs

But even if Obama successfully secures an all-inclusive, non-exclusive medical system in place, there still remains imperfection. In large part, medicines, by nature, aren't green because they're over-prescribed and over-used.

Just walk into a single drug store and you will find a sea of over-packaged plastic coated bottles, tubes and boxes of pills--pain-killers, flu fighters, cough syrups and pretty much something for everything. Convenience and access to this is undoubtedly great, but as a culture we have ended up always seeking a quick cure without thinking of the ripple effect that un-biodegradable packaging waste, un-properly disposed of medicine and over-used drugs have on our bodily systems and our planet.

Antibiotics for example have wound up polluting our water ways and over-use has resulted in resistant strains of bacteria that will be harder for immune systems to fight in the future. Traces of birth control have been found in our drinking water.

This isn't to say prescription drugs don't have their place—when they are absolutely needed, they can be life-saving but until we learn to use them sparingly or they are regulated as such, we should expect potentially dire, world-changing consequences.

Complimentary and Alternative Medicine

And this is exactly why you'll hear many environmentalists waxing poetic about the benefits of complimentary and alternative medicine. It isn't just some hippie fad. With increasing mistrust of pharmaceutical companies, doctors who are under the sway of them and decreasing access to health insurance, many are for good reason turning toward it.

Alternative medicine is an alternative (hence the name) to the medical system that hasn't fully thought out true cause and effect. By definition, it is any healing practice that falls outside of the realm of conventional medicine. Examples include naturopathy, chiropractic, herbalism, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, meditation, yoga, hyponosis, homeopathy and acupuncture. Complimentary medicine would be using one more of these practices in conjunction with conventional, mainstream medicine—which is precisely my M.O.

I have no qualms seeking care from a conventional doctor but I also make a point to do my best preventing an illness that might have me running to the nearest pharmacy for a quick over-the-counter fix and prevention is often found in the alternative practices listed above (as evident in all of our DIY remedies). Having dabbled in many of them, I know first-hand how these modalities are more likely low-impact and waste-free. Herbal remedies and tinctures are biodegradable, Ayurveda is nothing but a dietary shift that's largely vegetarian making it a low-carbon choice, and meditation requires little else than you and your breath.

As for yoga, I'm biased. As an instructor and a daily practitioner, I've seen both my students and myself increase energy levels, heal injuries, sleep more soundly and reduce the body's inflammatory response to stress—one of the biggest culprits that onsets disease.

Health Care for All First, All-Natural Medicine Later

So do I wish that the American medical system would more seriously recognize alternative and complimentary medicine as an integral part of medicine and include it as a service covered by insurance? Absolutely. But with other bridges to cross well before then—like making health coverage available to all—we shouldn't expect it anytime soon.

Think back to the times you've felt truly hungry or thirsty—I mean so much so that you've felt like you might faint without a bite of food to sustain you or a gulp of water to quench you. Did you make a rational, eco-responsible decision by going out of your way to buy locally or organically? I admit when I've found myself in that state of stupor, I certainly reached for whatever I could get my hands on.

Now apply this to the person suffering from a bad migraine, injury or stomach pain—they likely won't make an eco-rational decision.

Until we have medical attention available to all, it will be very difficult to wake up those without basic care to the importance of going green. But until then we can simply do our best to explore and seek out all-natural, waste-free healing methods on an individual level, if not for us, for Planet Earth.

Want to Do More?

Support Obama's health insurance reform by clicking over to my.barackobama.com to take some local, community action.