Unnatural Causes
Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
It often appears that we Americans are obsessed with health. Media outlets trumpet the latest gene and drug discoveries, dietary supplements line shelf after shelf in the supermarket and a multi-billion dollar industry of magazines, videos and spas sells healthy “lifestyles.” We spend more than twice what the average rich country spends per person on medical care.
Yet we have the worst disease outcomes of any industrialized nation – and the greatest health inequities. It’s not just the poor who are sick. Even the middle classes die, on average, almost three years sooner than the rich. And at every step down the socio-economic ladder, African Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders often fare worse than their white counterparts.
It wasn’t always this way. In half a century, we’ve fallen from ranking in the top 5 internationally for life expectancy to 30th. Our infant mortality rate is 31st. And illness now costs American business more than $1 trillion a year in lost productivity.
Healthy behaviors, molecular research, and of course, universal health care are all important. But evidence suggests they miss the most vital factor of all: how the social circumstances in which we are born, live and work can get under our skin and disrupt our biology as surely as germs and viruses.
We produced UNNATURAL CAUSES to draw attention to the root causes of health and illness and to help reframe the debate about health in America. Economic and racial inequality are not abstract concepts but hospitalize and kill even more people than cigarettes. The wages and benefits we’re paid, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools we attend, our access to resources and even our tax policies are health issues every bit as critical as diet, smoking and exercise.
The unequal distribution of these social conditions - and their health consequences - are not natural or inevitable. They are the result of choices that we as a community, as states, and as a nation have made, and can make differently. Other nations already have, and they live longer, healthier lives as a result.
We hope that UNNATURAL CAUSES and its companion tools will help you work towards better health, by bringing into view how economic justice, racial equality and caring communities may be the best medicines of all.
Larry Adelman Executive Producer December 2007
Sable
mrwjd
[...] Unnatural Causes [...]
“The unequal distribution of these social conditions - and their health consequences - are not natural or inevitable.”
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You know who understood and taught exactly this concept a long time ago, when our fathers were young? Helen Keller.
When you read or viewed “The Miracle Worker,” you may have noticed it is not about Helen Keller, but about the estimable Anne Sullivan, a heroine in her own right, and a feral child whom she with great creativity civilized and socialized. That was the Helen Keller of morality plays, the template we give our children for courage in overcoming obstacles.
What they DON’T tell us, purposely don’t tell us, is about the REAL Helen Keller–scholar, thinker, persuasive writer, political activist, and so much more. They prefer we don’t know her as someone who allied herself with liberal causes of the day, including black equality (she worked with MLK and was a founding contributor to the NAACP) and workers’ rights (she was even a member of the Wobbleys) in a time when workplace safety was not yet invented and a man who lost his hand or arm at the factory was out without a job, without compensation, without pension, without health insurance, and without hope.
Keller was a groundbreaker in fighting the fact that social class drives health and safety. Her parents were wealthy, her disabilities were not a result of poverty, and of course, they were able to hire Anne Sullivan. But this did not still her outrage at the fact that MOST blindness in her day was a result of eye infection contracted by infants in the birth canal and untreated because parents simply could not afford a doctor. A prophylactic drop of silver nitrate in each of a newborn’s eyes prevented blindness from this cause, but that trivial expense and effort was beyond the ability of many parents, even those with jobs. And treatment of the disease, once established, was prohibitive except for the rich. Her campaign to protect the vision of the babies of prostitutes appalled her society friends–but when you’re a personal correspondent of the President of the United States (FDR) even though blind and deaf, a little social disapprobation isn’t that scary.
Even today, we have to go “underground” to meet the real Helen Keller. Her good works are downplayed. At her childhood home/monument in Alabama, the red flag of the international workers’ movement has been replaced by the confederate flag (she is rolling in her grave) and all the photos are of white people (rolling AND doing somersaults).
But I digress. Since World War II, our economy has been strong. We have assumed that necessary medical care would be available, even for families unemployed or in poverty—and surely for workers and their families. Americans don’t die solely because they lack access to medical treatment!
Insidiously, though, the medical safety net has sprung holes, and people are falling through them, to their deaths. The depressed economy drives competition for goods and services we thought were sufficient for all, and the economy has just begun its free-fall. We can take nothing for granted. We must take affirmative steps if we are to preserve for the next decades a continuing access to necessary health care for workers and widows and children and the poor for which people like Helen Keller and Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought so hard when our parents were young. If we want to bring our children into the world they made for us, a world that would, so far as medically possible, offer us health and safety.