Health Beyond Civilization

Why is this whole Health Beyond Civilization theme so important?

Two reasons. First, if you’re reading this, you probably share the assumption, or are concerned about the possibility, that modern industrial civilization has reached its apex, because the oil supply on which it is based is now at a plateau or declining even while population and demand for oil skyrockets. Many, if not most, modern treatments for diseases are heavily based in relatively new pharmaceuticals and new technologies — and these are all based in a system that consumes massive amounts of oil, in surprising ways.

Among the few resources I could find on this topic is a report submitted to the Australian Senate on the impact of peak oil on medicine, co-authored by Dr. Paul Roth from PeakOilMedicine.com. It begins:

Most of our modern medical system is oil-dependent, just like the rest of society. Oil has been so cheap for so long that it has become a pervasive presence in health care delivery. This impact is most obvious when one looks at the transport systems required to maintain a health service. Just as suburbia has been subsidised by the endowment of cheap and plentiful oil, modern medical care is predicated on the cheap movement of things and people from one place to another. This cheap transportation is so crucial that the system must fall apart if no alternatives are developed before oil becomes scarce and even more expensive.

Above and beyond transportation costs, oil is present in items created from petrochemical derivatives (down to little things like rubber gloves and plastic syringes), or whose creation requires petrochemicals in their processing (stainless steel tools), or who simply require oil to run (anything that runs on electricity — MRIs, CT scanners, EKG monitors, pacemakers, computers, X-rays, etc.). Essentially, modern medicine evolved in an oil culture, and cannot exist without oil.

This poses a considerable problem to the entire edifice of modern health care if the oil supply starts to run out.

The second reason to explore Health Beyond Civilization is that, even without the gloom-and-doom, modern medicine’s technological, scientific, and corporate complexity has gotten to the point where it is simply no longer accessible to the average person. Filling the gap between you and your actual treatment are an arcane array of obstacles comprised of government institutions and health insurance corporations. This is a culture where your health is not determined by how you feel, but by the numbers in your chart — heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight; where it’s easier to get medications than it is to get good advice on nutrition; where doctors who spend a few minutes with you are somehow responsible for your well-being in life; where you may have no choice but to sit waiting in pain for hours in an ER even if you’ve broken a limb; where people have been known to die after the ambulances that carry them have been rejected by hospital after hospital.

Health is complicated, but these complications are needless.

And, despite the many successes of modern medicine that were the early triumphs of this complexity, we are already seeing diminishing returns. The aforementioned Australian report puts it eloquently in the context of peak oil:

Medicine is already straining national and household budgets throughout the western world. Most of the cheap and easy to treat conditions in the western world have been addressed with varying degrees of success. More and more money and effort is being expended to treat more and more expensive conditions for marginal gains in safety, longevity and quality of life. Medical inflation is dramatically outpacing general inflation. The inflationary effects of peak oil will widen this gap.

The complex intertwined research, development, manufacturing, transportation and logistical chains of the industries that provide everything from aspirin to MRI scanners; all the drugs, disposables, dressings, in short all the things we use in medicine, will be strained by peak oil. Input costs will rise and the purchasing capacity of national economies staggering on the brink of depression will fall when industry, employment, finance and investment are all hammered by peak oil.

All this is happening as the whole health system rapidly approaches the huge demographic discontinuity of aging baby boomers, a cohort about twice the size of generation preceding it, with their unbridled expectations of a healthy, active old age.

All of this is not to deny the effectiveness of the Western biomedical model. Many of us wouldn’t be alive if not for modern interventions.

Rather, the issue is this: Knowing, as we do, that conventional medicine is based in a culture of oil consumption, and knowing, as we do, that oil is running out … How can we adapt?

This is the exploration we must commit to. This is the exploration we embark upon on this blog.