Your health depends on the earth's health; Your health depends on your emotional health

“We need to debate health care, not health insurance!” Applause infects the audience as Dr. Andrew Weil begins to command the stage. “We don’t have a health care system, we have a disease management system.”

As a pre-med student aspiring to work as a doctor, these are sobering words, and yet they make so much sense. These days, we are trained to treat everything with pharmaceuticals. Not just doctors, who are rarely instructed in non-pharmaceutical treatments, but as consumers, we are constantly bombarded with the drug life style. The term Medicine itself, which as the good doctor Weil instructed us, used to mean “thoughtful action to establish order”, has now become synonymous with drugs. Today, ten times more drugs are used than were in the 1950s, and we are as much responsible as the companies.

So what does this have to do with the environment? Well, dependence on pharmaceuticals and expensive, unnecessary machinery isn’t the only thing driving up health care. As I learned from Dr. Russel Jaff at an afternoon session on “Integrative Medicine, Environmental health, and the Transformation of Health Care”, an absolutely astounding 92% (NINETY-TWO PERCENT!!!!) of ill health can be traced to life-style, while only 8% is genetic. This life style can be dissected in any number of ways, but ultimately has to do with our disconnection from the earth.

We suffer from poor nutrition as we practice damaging agricultural systems that destroy the earth and produce fewer healthy foods. Even the fruits and vegetables we grow today are less nutritious than those we grew a century ago. We are also suffering from our sedentary lifestyle, brought about by the wave of industry that allowed us to drive cars, take elevators, and work in offices instead of on the land. We also suffer tremendously from the chemicals we pump into the environment, and which we then breathe, and drink, and eat. "Carcinogens cause cancer" Annie Leonard reminded us. There is probably NO "safe" level for these chemicals.

Despite this overwhelming figure (92%... REALLY), we only spend 2-10% of research money on issues of lifestyle, and in finding solutions to evoke natural healing responses.

So back to the “medicine.” We have adopted a reductionist view of the human body as an imperfect machine that inevitably breaks down, and so needs fixing. We need to readopt an integrative view that acknowledges that our body is already perfect, and we need only protect it and maintain the miraculous system it already is.

According to Dr. Weil, health is an inner state of balance and resilience that we are born with. When we are healthy, we can fall and our body will repair the skin, we can interact with bacteria and not get infected, we can be exposed to viruses and not get sick. Our body can do this already, all we need to do is provide it with an environment conducive to good health. The power of nature to restore the body and calm the mind, has been proven for millennia, and is even now being proven using scientific techniques.

Your mental health is often ignored when looking at your physical health, but consider this study: A group of Harvard students was exposed to a strain of the common flu. Now, we can expect that these students already lead very stressful lives, and so their immune systems are already down and statistically, they should get sick. Half of the group that was exposed to the strain was told to just go out and live their lives, and as a no brainer, they got the cold. Duh. But the other half of the group was shown an inspiring film about Mother Teresa and the power of human compassion. And guess what? Students in this group were significantly less likely to contract the cold. Further studies showed that simply feeling compassion is enough to rev your immune system for hours, and to elevate your immune system’s response for weeks.

Perhaps if we had more faith and hope in humanity, and allowed ourselves more love and rejoice in the earth, we could finally allow ourselves to heal ourselves. We could create a system of caring for our health, instead of having to insure it.