Health Care, Not Sick Care

Best-selling author and physician Dr. Andrew Weil spends an hour with Diane Rehm explaining how the American health care system could be more appropriately tagged "sickness care," and he offers suggestions on how the system can be changed to promote a holistic approach to health and healing at considerably less cost.

His new book - Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future - Dr. Weil makes the case for a greater awareness of wellness in the way we approach health care.


Click on Dr. Weil's website for a more comprehensive look at holistic medicine and wellness through the mind/body/spirit connection.

And Michael Pollan recently penned an insightful op-ed piece - Big Food vs. Big Insurance - about how the way we grow and eat food in the US impacts health care costs.

An Excerpt:

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care."

Water Infrastructure

Some of the stimulus money in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is dedicated to construction and maintenance of water infrastructure.

Over the next decade, the US will need to rethink where we obtain and how we process potable drinking water or many areas of the country may run dry. Areas of lower rainfall like Arizona are considering such wild-eyed solutions as pumping water from the Mississippi River, over a thousand miles away, to meet the fast-growing demand for clean water.

How we deal with waste water, storm water, energy generation, and food production dramatically impacts the demand for clean water.

Infrastructure, when it comes to water, does not just refer to man-made systems. The health of natural water infrastructure - wetlands, headwaters, riparian corridors, etc. - dramatically impacts the availability of clean water and the cost of processing water to potable standards.

A few water facts:

One third of America's processed potable water is used to flush toilets.
It takes as much as 2500 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol.
In some areas, up to 25 percent of processed water is used for cooling power plants.
Farming, mostly with low-efficiency flood irrigation systems, siphons off as much as 80 percent of some local water supplies.

There's an informative discussion on water infrastructure in a recent segment of the Diane Rehm show. From this interview, I learned a new term - Hydrostitute. Hydrostitutes are hydrologists who manipulate water models to conform to political will.

The link: http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/03/25.php#25707