Physical Therapy & Proactive Health for Sustainability
Here's a new idea:
Our personal physical health is connected to the health of our planet ecologically.
Photo by Emma Simpson @esdesignisms
The healthier we are, the more we tend to live a healthy lifestyle, and the less negative impact we may have on our environment. I say "may have" because our ecological impact is tied to choices that we make, and there are many daily choices that can have an environmental effect.
Being sustainable, buying sustainable products, and living sustainably has increased in popularity in the last few years. Maybe you’ve heard the terms: eco-conscious, eco-friendly, eco-products, etc. I believe that by prioritizing our health and wellness, we are making one choice and taking one step to support the sustainability of our planet.
How did we get to this point of caring about sustainability?
People want things to be easier. They want products and services that make their life easier. This is the driver of all innovation and technology. Many of the initial solutions did make our lives easier, but at the cost of our environment and ecological support system, the earth. It took years before the effects were able to be seen and quantified, and has taken even more years for the effects to rapidly worsen, to become more globally apparent, and for an international conversation and movement toward sustainability to begin to take shape. Sure, large-scale governmental and corporation-level changes can have the most drastic effect, but agreements and deals and implementation takes a long time.
So what can be done today?
Individuals can make choices to reduce their consumption of resources and creation of waste. Many personal level sustainable changes may not actually make life easier, because they require a little more effort, time, or thought. They might require more planning ahead, going to different stores and farmer's markets, and more intentional cooking, eating, or cleaning. It might involve adding the effort of composting or recycling or donating - and not just "throwing it in the trash" where we can immediately forget it and move on. This can create a barrier for those wanting to enter living sustainably. Also consider that some sustainable options require more activity and movement of our bodies, which if we haven't been proactive in maintaining our physical health and activity abilities, may also become quite the barrier.
Photo by Nikola Jovanovic
Here's how your health affects the health of our earth.
If you want to dive in to living sustainably, you need to be able to cook, bake, garden, plant, harvest, go to farmer's markets, compost, and more. This means physically you need to be able to stand, bend over, push, pull, squat, crouch, kneel, lift, pinch, roll, reach, grasp, and maintain balance. You can lean in further by walking or bicycling and taking public transit instead of driving everywhere. Often times when illness or chronic conditions are present our ability to be physically active in the ways listed above, are limited, which limits our ability to operate in optimal sustainable ways. By prioritizing our physical health and wellness when we are younger and maintaining this as we age, we reduce the likelihood of physical decline.
Secondly, chronic diseases contribute to many doctor's visits, procedures including imaging and surgery, and pharmaceutical prescriptions. All of the above require consumption of many non-renewable resources.
Let's talk about how your health relates to amount of fossil fuels used and driving emissions. Typically when you are healthier, you have a much lower frequency of doctor appointments which means less total miles driven to appointments. You will tend to have fewer specialist visits required. People often have to drive farther to access specialists, especially if they live in a rural area and have to drive into the city for their specialist appointments. This increases the distance driven, directly increasing the emissions and gas utilized. If patients live in an urban area and are healthier, they will have a greater ability to walk or bike to appointments or to mass transit to get to their appointments. This results in an overall reduction of fossil fuels used, especially as cities move toward greater electric powered mass transit options.
Now, how about the impact of medications. When was the last time you got a prescription filled, whether at your local pharmacy or shipped to you? How many layers of packaging were used? I bet it came in a bag, perhaps in a box or sleeve inside the bag, or in a plastic container. Imagine how much packaging could be saved if people needed to take fewer medicines because they were healthier!
Fewer surgical and imaging instruments and supplies are used when patients are healthier because fewer of these procedures are warranted and fewer hospital admissions are needed. That means less: gloves, paper covering exam tables and gowns, thermometer covers, syringes, IVs, hospital beds/sheets/pillows, and even less plastic and styrofoam used for hospital food delivery. It all adds up when you think about it, and every patient creates some amount of medical waste. Many health systems that are ecologically conscious are implementing programs to try to reduce their waste and environmental impact. Be aware of those in your local community who are taking these efforts and support them when you do need medical attention and care. Did you know that helium is necessary for MRIs and is becoming more scarce on the planet? I have certainly taken our advanced medical care for granted a little bit, and have only recently realized that it uses finite and non-renewable resources and creates a lot of waste. We should also support research that looks to find alternative and more renewable methods to provide high-quality medical care and consider our own ability to reduce this burden to the planet, by taking responsibility for our own health.
Photo by HS Ender
So I've been considering, how can physical therapists help promote and support our communities to be able to live more sustainably, with fewer barriers or less difficulty?
Here are a few ideas I've come up with and am implementing as part of my physical therapy business model at Stubbs Mobile Physical Therapy.
1. We should promote & enable all kinds of physical activity !! Duh, but WHY?
For Self- transportation
As PTs we are uniquely skilled to provide services to improve walking and bicycling safety, movement patterns, strength, endurance, stability, and confidence. We can create programs to progress endurance so that our clients are able to bicycle and walk for transportation among their communities. We should also support bike lines, greenways, sidewalks and other measures that support safe modes of human-powered transit in our community.
For Nutrition
The ability to garden, cook, and bake lends people to be able to consume more nutritious meals and foods. Cooking and baking from scratch takes more time and physical effort than a pre-made microwaveable dinner or a bag salad. You have to be able to stand for longer periods of time, be able to bend over slightly to the stove or counter or even lower to the oven. You also need core stability and arm and hand strength for repetitive tasks and grasping. It also means you dirty more dishes which take time to clean. Gardening takes this another step further, to growing and harvesting food that you will prepare to eat. This requires bending, stooping, squatting, kneeling, crouching, pushing, pulling and much more. We as PTs are able to instruct muscle activation and exercises to improve our ability to continue to grow, garden, cook, and bake at any age. (Now, I'm not hating on bag salads, because they make it so easy to have something healthy to eat for lunch on the go. However, I recently have noticed and felt more guilty about the amount of single use plastic packaging required to make that meal.) But the benefit of cooking and gardening is that you control the ingredients, so they are usually all fresh or in a more raw state, and you can control how much added salt, fat, sugar, etc are in the food you eat. There are fewer preservatives and other additives that are added for shelf-life or flavor.
For Reducing CO2 in Cities
Gardening and planting or landscaping also play a role in adding more plant life and greenery to our cities, which not only makes them more beautiful, but can help with utilizing CO2 from emissions to produce and release more oxygen into the air. They can also aid in water retention and ecosystem preservation. Being able to maintain your own property landscape and plants or even volunteering to help in other areas of your community contributes to more vibrant ecosystem.
Being stronger, healthier, more balanced, and having less pain or stiffness is what physical therapists do, and directly contributes to the ability of our patients to employ sustainable and healthy lifestyle practices with minimal difficulty.
2. As service providers, we should aim to make our business practices as sustainable as possible.
Stubbs Mobile Physical Therapy aims to reduce it's carbon footprint and ecological impact by:
Being MOBILE!
This eliminates the need for a separate facility requiring utilities, which reduces overall electricity and water resource usage. Sure I drive to you, so there is still a fossil fuel cost currently, but I am planning for an electric and solar-powered sprinter van to eliminate emissions and use of fossil fuels in delivering excellent physical therapy and wellness services.
Offering Telehealth or Virtual Services
Obviously a virtual visit eliminates the use of fossil fuels for transport to your appointment. But it also encourages use of items already present within your home, which results in reduced consumption and decreased waste. I love getting creative and re-purposing items into treatment and exercise tools.
Thanks for checking out how physical therapy and your health relate to sustainable living. If you have additional ideas, please share them with me!