10041 Health Hazards

Lifestyle Disease

The way people live often causes disease. Average consumption of sugar is more than 135 POUNDS per person per year in the United States. Sedentary lifestyles that avoid manual labor drive obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Smoking kills millions with lung cancer and emphysema and COPD.

Injury

The thing to do about injury is to avoid getting injured in the first place. I don’t know what more can be said than that. The proverb “Look before you leap!” has a long and venerable history and our mothers all have a long list of things that they never wanted any of us to do.

The potential for injury should be an aspect of the observation and evaluation that goes into your design work. To the best of your ability, your permaculture goal is to design yourself an injury-free lifestyle (“care for people,” and “care for the planet,” since injuries cause damage and require resources to redress). Alas, our circumstances are rarely within our total control. That’s why they call them “accidents.”

Chemical Pollution

We swim in a sea of chemicals, many of which are toxic to the ecology and to people. The research available about the consequences of chemical exposure is incomplete. Studies indicating dangers may be suppressed or not done for economic reasons. The best thing to do is follow the precautionary principle and avoid personal contamination by potentially toxic chemicals. While no one should become neurotic about this, we don’t have to go out of our way to drink a toxic cocktail every day. Some common sense precautions include:

Study your water system’s report on the quality and purity of its water. If there are problems, get a water purifier for your dwelling.

Avoid dry-clean-only clothing and use non-toxic cleaning methods for any such clothing you already have.

Follow the Environmental Working Group’s recommendations on which vegetables to “always eat organic.” http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/

Avoid plastic as much as is practical in your situation. Never heat anything made of plastic in the microwave, even if the container says “microwave-safe.”

Don’t smoke. Don’t go into any room or building with second hand tobacco or marijuana smoke.

Use non-toxic home cleaning products. Use the Environmental Working Group’s database on cleaning products to determine which products are safe for use in your home. http://www.ewg.org/guides/cleaners

Use non-toxic health and beauty products. Many commercial health and beauty products contain questionable chemicals. Check the Environmental Working Group’s recommendations to find safe products. http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/

Doctor-caused disease.

An often overlooked problem with medical care is that medical treatments can cause disease. This includes side effects of drugs and serious medical mistakes made by doctors and other medical personnel. I know people who went into hospitals for relatively minor procedures and came out dead or irrevocably maimed by antibiotic resistant infections they caught in the hospital.

People should be as cautious about their medical care as they are with their money. Doctors and nurses should be carefully questioned about diagnosis and treatment alternatives. Four questions should always be asked:

• Is this the only alternative?
• What are the risks, side effects, and possible unintended consequences of this treatment?
• What happens if I don’t treat this in the method you want?
• How much does this cost?

Never allow medical personnel to bully or rush you into making a decision that you are not sure is in your best interest, or in the best interest of those you care for.

Most doctors and medical personnel have good ethics, but not all. Medicine is big business. Doctors sometimes recommend procedures and treatments because the doctor or clinic or hospital makes a lot of money on the procedure, drug, or treatment. It’s not ethical, it happens.

Don’t hesitate to ask for a written quote if you are paying cash and the procedure will be expensive.

When people take their cars to mechanics, it is not unusual to ask for a written quote. The same is true of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. Yet, when it comes to medical care, all-too-often people hesitate to ask and don’t understand that as with anything else, you can negotiate prices and costs with medical professionals.

Unlike most stores, which have set prices for products, in the United States, medical care prices for treatments vary based on the social and economic class of the patient.

Persons covered by insurance plans, either privately paid or government sponsored, pay less for medical care and drugs.

Persons who do not have insurance plans pay higher prices unless they can negotiate a better deal.

You would think that those with the least ability to pay (the people who have no insurance and thus must pay cash) would pay the least. That’s not the way medical care works in the United States. Persons living in other countries with more rational and human systems of medical care are lucky to not be faced with these kinds of situations.

Insurance companies use their pricing power (the large number of people covered by their plans) to negotiate prices with hospitals and doctors. “Give us a discount or we will send our insured patients elsewhere.” So the hospitals and doctors oblige the insurance corporations. The same thing happens with government programs like Medicaid and Medicare. They pay discounted prices. Given the fact that medical care providers —

• can’t shift the costs onto other insurance plans, and
• can’t shift the costs onto government plans,
• there is only one place those costs can be shifted and that is onto the wallet of the cash-paying customer.

People who don’t have insurance need to negotiate their own deals with hospitals and insurance. If your medical providers aren’t interested in negotiating, then find someone who is. There’s a lot of competition among medical providers. Pick up the phone and start calling. Meanwhile, write a letter of complaint to your state’s Board of Medical Ethics about the discrimination practiced by any medical provider who charges you more because of your social and economic location (a person who has no medical insurance).

You don’t have to buy the Cadillac. You might do better with the Metro.

In medical care, as with everything else, there is often a range of options. Sometimes they can be ranked “Cadillac” or “Metro.” The Metro option is likely to be much less expensive.

For example, dentists are masters at getting patients to spend thousands of dollars for crowns and bridge work. A partial denture might be a better choice financially and work just fine for many people.

You will likely find a better deal on dentures, both full and partial, if you can find a denturist that will deal directly with you. Denturists are the people who actually make dentures. You may pay only half the price charged by dentists for your dentures or partials if you get them directly from a denturist. In most states, however, dentists have a lot of political power and the law forbids denturists from selling directly to the public. Even so, you can likely find one or more denturists who do this — the trick is to find out who and where they are. Given the price dentists charge for dentures, if money is an issue for you it is worth the time and effort to find a denturist and do business directly with him or her.

Watch out for high overhead doctors and dentists.

When you go to a doctor or dental appointment, scrutinize the office. Avoid highly decorated offices in expensive locations. You and the other patients pay for all the overhead. That expensive location and fancy decor has nothing to do with the quality of medical care.

Expensive locations may not have the best medical care. The more high rent the premises, the faster a doctor must work just to pay the overhead. The faster a doctor works, the greater the possibility of mistakes.

Look for doctors, dentists, and other medical professionals in offices located in less expensive, less trendy locations, with smaller offices and more value priced decorations.

Do your part to stop the spread of contagious disease.

If you have a contagious disease, stay home. Don’t be a “trooper” and go to work and spread your illness to others. Call in sick, stay home, get well. Spreading contagious germs is irresponsible behavior.

Design a healthy life.

Your permaculture design for your life should consider the health hazards that present in your life and design ways to avoid, mitigate, or manage them. Look for beneficial connections that will integrate well into the activities of your life. Also look for negative connections and eliminate those chains of causality from your life to prevent illness, injury, or death.