Health is not individual.
Within medicine (and the wellness industry), we see a lot of focus on individuals: making healthy choices, adjusting one’s own lifestyle, taking time for self-care, etc. All of this is wonderful of course, but in reality we can never heal if our society is sick or if our health comes at the expense of others.
There are innumerable barriers to health for many communities. While it is certainly easier to focus on individual action (‘an apple a day…’ ‘quit smoking’ ‘exercise!’) rather than to tackle the structural inequities that give rise to individual choices, we’re not accurately assessing or addressing public health realities. Certainly it’s a daunting task — it’s a lot easier to tell someone to eat more vegetables than to work to dismantle and restructure the systems in which we live in order to imagine a world in which health is equally available to all. But that’s the big work.
In holistic healthcare we look at the whole person — not just an individual symptom but rather the interaction of all their bodily systems as well as their mind, emotions, & spirit — but in reality we have to look beyond the individual patient to their relationships, environment, society, and structures in which they live.
The social ecological model of health reminds us that health includes clean water, soil, and air, access to healthy food, safe and green neighborhoods for exercise, access to education and employment, and social support. True healthcare must therefore address issues of injustice such as mass incarceration, unfair zoning and redlining, lack of school funding, unsafe work conditions, and placement of polluting factories or diesel corridors near communities of color. Health is interpersonal, intergenerational, social, systemic, and environmental.
Deep gratitude for organizations in Chicago doing grassroots work to affect the determinants of health for their communities. If we’re going to truly make change, it’s going to come from many angles and it’s going to take a lot of us.