The Impact of Vanishing Biodiversity on Human Health (VIDEO LINK)

Your Health has it’s own ecosystem, dependent on the greater ecosystem

- by Claudia Rowe — YES! Magazine

Our Health is Ecosystem Health: Dr. Ted Schettler, a Harvard-educated physician, frustrated by the limitations of science in combating disease, believes that finding answers to the most persistent medical challenges of our time—conditions that now threaten to overwhelm our health care system—depends on understanding the human body as a system nested within a series of other, larger systems: one’s family and community, environment, culture, and socioeconomic class, all of which affect each other. He has researched connections between poverty, iron deficiency, and lead poisoning; insecticide use, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease; income disparities and asthma.

He calls this new approach to medicine “the ecological paradigm of health.”

Our Health and Ecosystem Health

“Can there be any doubt that human health is enormously dependent on ecological systems that we are having a major influence on?” Schettler says. “It’s all one world. Our tendency to describe the natural world as something without humans is part of the problem.”

“It’s accepting up front that humans do not stand apart from the environment. We’re a major species, along with the mosquitoes and fish and trees and bacteria. And there are all of these wonderful interrelationships.” … continued …

Returning to a Holistic Approach to Life: Breast Cancer and Chemicals, Fresh Fruits and Vegetables vs Industrial Processed Food, Epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cancer; public health system; income inequality are all factors discussed in this article.

via Why Your Health Is Bigger Than Your Body by Claudia Rowe — YES! Magazine.