Medical Dark Matter: Living Conditions Determine Health
Posted by Nate Hagens on February 7, 2010 - 9:10am in The Oil Drum: Campfire
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: health care, public health [list all tags]
Below the fold is a guest essay from a friend of mine who posts on The Oil Drum as 'Rock climber' who is an internal medicine M.D. practicing in East-central Minnesota. The post is a shortened version of a longer essay on the interrelationships between health care, human health, human happiness and resource use. As the healthcare sector makes up fully 17% of the GDP of the USA and therefore represents a significant fraction of our resource throughput, this is a very important topic in discussions of more sustainable systems. If medical care is as inefficient as Rock climber thinks, healthcare policies focusing on basics might save considerable energy and other resources.
Abstract
I’ve been working on problems completely removed from Peak Oil, but the ignorance of big problems and the solutions turned out much the same. “Medical Dark Matter” is my metaphor for ignoring the causes of our relatively poor health.
Astronomers looked right past most of reality (96% invisible “dark matter”) until recently. Doctors looked only inside the body and thereby missed about 85% of what really makes people sick or healthy.
Although doctors can save some sick people, they have no power to make most people live longer. Despite over $2 trillion a year of modern medical care, US life expectancy has dropped to 50th in the world (CIA 2009) behind all of Europe and behind some very poor countries. It seems to me that societal factors account for about 85% of differences in life expectancy, with genetics and individual health care accounting for the remainder.
Social factors- differences in our artificially created everyday living conditions- are the real keys to human health. Health is improved by money, social status, healthy early childhood, education and a good job. Poverty and lack of control hurt health. Chronic stress boosts hormones that may harm health. Health choices (diet, exercise, and smoking) are shaped by the neighborhoods we live in, which are influenced by powerful business interests. Income equality is an interesting and controversial factor influencing health. The health of the wealthy may depend in part on the well being of the rest of society.
Money buys health for individual rich Americans, but has failed to make average Americans healthier. What we decide about healthcare reform will have no effect on US life expectancy, since doctors have so little influence on health.
Our American lifestyle takes years off our lives and cannot be sustained indefinitely by available energy resources...
The article continues here:
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