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."

Farmer in Chief

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, penned an open letter in the New York Times Magazine to the next "Farmer in Chief" outlining the negative consequences of our current food policy and offering up some healthy ideas about how we can bring about positive change in the way we eat - and save the planet along the way.

From the article:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

Check out the entire article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Michael%20Pollan%20letter%20farmer%20in%20chief&st=cse&oref=slogin