It is safe to assume that, for most people, the first thing that pops into their head when they think of sustainability is “environmentally friendly” and/or “green.” I was definitely one of those people. I immediately associated the term with recycling, pollution, solar panels, and hybrid cars. This is all good and well, but there is so much more to sustainability than one would suspect. Attempting to answer what seemed to be an unanswerable question of what sustainability truly is, several sites came to my aid and I started to get a better sense of what it meant. The most precise and cogent definition I found was as follows: “Sustainability means meeting our present needs without compromising the prospects of future generations”.

However, in my opinion, sustainability can be defined in one word that encompasses all other definitions found on the Internet: alternatives— alternatives to the way we are currently conducting our lives. This includes alternative energy (i.e. solar energy), alternative foods (i.e. healthier substitutions to the junk that is causing obesity), alternative medicine, among others. These alternatives have economic, social, and environmental impacts.

Having an interest in medicine, the concept of sustainable medicine caught my attention instantly when I stumbled upon “The Center for Sustainable Medicine”, which aims to create an alternative to the current healthcare situation. As stated by the founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine, Didi Pershouse, the purpose of this alternative is “to create a new model of healthcare” by combining and sharing the knowledge of the “best minds in the fields of ecology, medicine, and sustainability”. I found this particularly interesting because this is precisely what this class is all about: the exchange of ideas in order to foster the creation of new ideas.

Sustainable medicine is associated to the concepts of alternative medicine (http://www.chrismadden.co.uk/yah/complimentary-medicine-cartoon.gif) and homeopathy, which is common in many parts of Asia. Why exactly should we be concerned with sustainable medicine? The answer is simply money. Health care is getting more expensive each and every day, the elderly of who are being affected the most. Health care costs for those over 65 are approximately four times higher than for those under 65. In the article, Sustainable Medicine, Daniel Callahan outlines another purpose of sustainable medicine: it "also requires comparing health care expenditure with spending on other socially important goods”. For example, he mentions that “we often overlook the health benefits of spending money in ways that have nothing to do with the direct delivery of medical care: education and health, for example, are strongly correlated: the higher the former the better the latter.”

I chose to focus on sustainable medicine for two reasons. First of all, ever since I had my first experience with dissections in an introductory biology class my freshman year in high school, I have had an interest in medicine. Second of all, on June 16, 2008, I lost a cousin to leukemia who, before he underwent a bone marrow transplant here in the United States, from what I have been told, he had been seeing several homeopathic medicine practitioners in Colombia.

My freshman year of high school I was introduced to the fascinating, yet complex world of biology. Luckily, I had an excellent teacher who made my learning of such a dense subject a rather painless experience. I always looked forward to the days when we had to dissect animals. Despite the smell of formaldehyde, which I think most people will generally agree is a foul one, cutting into animals such as frogs and rats gave me a very small glimpse into the daily lives of surgeons; of course, they’re cutting open humans, not creatures. Learning about the various bodily systems and how they function really sparked my interest and I wanted to learn more; thus, began my exploration of the Discovery Health channel.

Watching shows on the Discovery Health channel never seemed to be enough; I always wanted a little more. I decided to do an internship at Northside Hospital and Tampa Bay Heart Institute my junior year, which turned out to be one of the best learning experiences I have ever had (aside from going out of state for college). Being in the actual environment where doctors are day in and day out gives you a different perspective of what it is they have to do and deal with. It is definitely a different perspective from the one you see on television. Don’t believe shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and E.R. They’re merely a romanticized version of the truth and only give the public a misleading idea of what actually goes on behind the scenes at hospitals. During my internship, I was shown around the various departments of Northside such as Radiology, the Emergency Room, and the Operating Rooms. One day, in fact, I was allowed to stay in an operating room for the length of an entire surgery while a patient had a cancerous tumor removed from her stomach. The length of the surgery, which lasted approximately two hours, gave me time to reflect on the importance and magnitude of a doctor’s job. Essentially, they save lives. This seems obvious, of course, but in a lot of cases it can be a matter of life or death. Being the person who affects whether someone lives or dies is a mentally taxing profession. From here on, I had my mind set on becoming a doctor. I wasn’t sure what kind, exactly, but I just knew I wanted to become one.

About a year after I finished my internship at Northside, I lost a cousin to leukemia. He was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) in 2001 at the age of 14. This type of leukemia “affects the white blood cells called lymphocytes, which control the body's immune response by finding and destroying foreign substances, such as viruses.” The origin of this disease is not really well known, but there is some speculation that it may be genetic. This could very well be the case since my dad lost his brother to leukemia also. For the next several years, my cousin, Sebastian, was taken to the best doctors in his area and given all sorts of chemotherapy. In addition to this, he was also taken to alternative medicine doctors who gave him various treatments that are not part of standard Western medicine protocol. In any case, it seemed as though the combination of the two treatments prevented the disease from getting any worse. This allowed my cousin to live a normal teenage life, or at least more normal than most patients with the same disease. In fact, he was responding so well to the treatments that, although he lost his hair at the beginning, it grew back completely, which is quite rare for people with the disease.

In the summer of 2005, my aunt and Sebastian came to this country in the hopes of finding a bone marrow donor so that my cousin could undergo a bone marrow transplant, which, if the patient responds well to it, is the most effective way of combating the disease. They stayed with my family and I for several weeks after I graduated high school that May. Ultimately, Sebastian was fortunate enough to find a donor and underwent the transplant at the beginning of June. After the surgery, doctors were surprised at how well he was responding. Everything seemed like it was going well in the beginning until June 16 when his body had a sudden negative reaction that caused his death.

After reading the sites devoted to spreading the idea of sustainable medicine, I have become a big fan of it. It will only be a matter of time before Western health care decides to catch up and provide a new alternative to its situation.

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