Green Medicine: HOW alignment towards Green Medicine for SDG3 impact is the game-changer!
Why Aligning #SDG3 Good Health & Wellbeing with #GreenMedicine will have the most Impact
To achieve the 2030 Agenda towards sustainable development, large investors, NGOs, enterprises, and governmental agencies aim to target theUN’s Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) by aligning funding and tracking their impact to each of the SDGs. As they attempt to push the needle further to make real impact with SDG3 Good Health & Wellbeing outcomes — #GreenMedicine will be the game-changer.
The 3-part series will explain the WHAT, WHY, & HOW of #GreenMedicine to impact SDG3.
(Part 1): WHAT is Green Medicine?
(Part 2): WHY Green Medicine matters?
(Part 3): HOW alignment towards Green Medicine for SDG3 impact is the game-changer
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(Part1) WHAT is Green Medicine?
Akin to its cousin #GreenEnergy, #GreenMedicine is biologically centered, sustainable in treating ‘root-cause,’ and non-toxic. Likewise, they both require their biological ecosystem to be balanced to maintain health.
Biologically Centered
Green Medicine is a biologically centered approach that addresses the complexity of disease and health. It is person-centered care that treats the whole-person as a complex-adaptive system and promotes the innate healing capacity of our bodies to restore optimal health. Green Medicine is a science-based approach grounded in systems-biology, where ‘the whole is bigger than the sum-of-parts’ when treating patients.
Sustainable
Green Medicine is sustainable in treating ‘root-cause’. Its approach is to understand the underlying cause of dysfunction and then focus on restoring the structural bio-integrity of the body. The patient is engaged and empowered through an individualized treatment plan. In contrast, conventional medicine focuses on disease-management to treating chronic symptoms, often requiring life-time annuity payments to #BigPharma or on-going expensive interventions that don’t get at the ‘root-cause’ of disease.
Non-Toxic
Green Medicine is biologically safe. It ascribes to a Therapeutic Order of treatment that first maximizes benefit and reduces the potential for damage or harm in the process of re-engineering health. Often, conventional medicine is associated with negative side-effects that recur in the process of suppressing symptoms. Green Medicine is the ultimate “Hippocratic Oath = Do No Harm.”
Green Medicine (an appropriated meme) is synonymous to Integrative Medicine(IM). These practices frame treatment from a wholistic (salutogensis) approach in addressing the physical, mental, spiritual, social, and environmental factors that influence health. They treat root-cause to restore optimal health and depend upon unique biomarkers that indicate where there might be dysfunction (i.e. inflammation, microbiome imbalance, environmental toxins, and vital life energy). Non-invasive treatments are preferred, but when necessary conventional medicine that is invasive is combined with Integrative Medicine toprovide the best synergistic effort towards optimal health.
Green Medicine = Integrative Medicine (IM)
Common IM approaches are:
· Traditional Chinese Medicine/Acupuncture
· Etc.
#GreenMedicine practices are evidence-based-medicine for treating chronic conditions and are biologically centered, sustainable in treating root-cause, and are non-toxic.
Find out WHY Green Medicine is necessary to impact SDG3 in Part 2 of this blog series.
Tags:
#SDG3 #HealthWellbeing #GreenMedicine #IntegrativeMedicine #SDG3Alignment #sustainability #Medicine
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(Part 2): Why Green Medicine matters?
In Part 1, you learned WHAT is Green Medicine. Akin to its cousin #GreenEnergy, #GreenMedicine is biologically centered, sustainable in treating ‘root-cause,’ and non-toxic. Likewise, they both require their biological ecosystem to be balanced to maintain health.
The Green Medicine meme is used as an important distinction from conventional medicine — I will explain later in this blog. But first let’s understand the limitations of conventional medicine’s approach in treating chronic conditions and why Green Medicine’s methodology can fill the gap.
The data suggests that conventional medicine has had limited success in addressing the rapid growth in chronic conditions. In the U.S.:
- 1 in 2 individuals suffer from at least one chronic condition — Aging adults tend to have multiple +3 chronic conditions
- Chronic conditions are responsible for 7 out of 10 deaths
- 75% of healthcare spending is on chronic conditions (much higher for Medicare/Medicaid populations)
- +$3 trillion yearly healthcare spend — approaching +20% of GDP
We seem to be wasting away our healthcare dollars. This is NOT sustainable! There are solutions.
“What makes treating chronic conditions (and efforts to manage population health) particularly challenging is that chronic conditions often do not exist in isolation.” (NIH Empirical Study)
Recently, at the Aspen Institute, where frontier ideas are explored, a pioneering doctor poignantly described conventional medicine’s conundrum in treating chronic conditions by saying that it ascribes to the theory of:
“A single agent causes a single disease, that is treated by a single pharmaceutical drug.” (Dr. Mark Hyman, Director Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine)
When evidence suggests conventional medicine has had limited success in treating chronic conditions, employing the same methodology as a strategy for funding SDG3 alignment is NOT a sustainable solution.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein
Let’s understand further why Green Medicine matters in filling the gap.
Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, pioneers in the application of systems-thinking, argue that it is necessary to view the human body within a complex adaptive system context and not the reductionistic, mechanistic ontology under which conventional medicine operates. Furthermore, conventional medicine’s reliance on some antiquated biomarkers (e.g. BMI) as metrics can create misconceptions for scaling medicine.
The whole is what matters (Green Medicine), NOT the sum of parts (siloed treatments focused on different human organ functions).
Therefore, based on advances in behavioral economics, one can argue that what really matters is how Medicine is framed, and that should dictate the approach.
Framing context dictates the approach and the outcome:
Conventional medicine is based on a pathogenesis framing, which is focused on the path of disease and disease management of symptoms with its tools being drugs, devices, and surgery.
Green Medicine is anchored on a salutogensis ontology that frames factors that promote restoring the body towards homeostasis and wellbeing from a wider whole-systems approach, with different bio-marker metrics as influencers of health to treat root-cause.
Ideally, the evolution of new quantitative foundations and metrics are necessary to access the complexity of divergent biological networks (e.g. circulatory, respiratory, neural, genetic, metabolic, mitochondrial etc. … plus, health influencers such as the microbiome, inflammation, meridian channels, environmental toxins etc.). The outcome metrics developed should factor in these inherent dynamic’s and rank approaches based on low risk/high reward towards optimal health.
Yet, Green Medicine is re-thinking the medical model towards a systems biology context to understand the complex process of health, disease, and dysfunction and a more sustainable approach with the capacity of producing outcome metrics that improve chronic conditions targeted by SDG3. Thus, the imperative exists that as Best Practicesfor impact measurement evolve they must consider the complexity of a systems biology approach in scoring impact for SDG3 alignment.
#GreenMedicine practices are evidence-based-medicine for treating chronic conditions and are biologically centered, sustainable in treating root-cause, and are non-toxic.
Next, in Part 3, let’s consider the HOW aligning SDG3 impact towards Green Medicine provides an opportunity as a game changer for investors/funders.
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(Part 3): HOW alignment towards Green Medicine for SDG3 impact is the game-changer
Part 1, covered WHAT is Green Medicine, Part 2 discussed WHY Green Medicine matters.
Akin to its cousin #GreenEnergy, #GreenMedicine is biologically centered, sustainable in treating ‘root-cause,’ and non-toxic. Likewise, they both require their biological ecosystem to be balanced to maintain health. Green Medicine is the necessary approach to aligning with SDG3.
Let’s understand the fast-moving trend towards SDG alignment.
The United Nations 2030 Agenda is a bold agenda for 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 specific targets for action on economic, social, and environmental well-being for people, planet, and prosperity. SDG 3 is Good Health & Wellbeing and consists of 13 targets, with one target specific to chronic conditions.
By 2030, reduce by one-third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment and promote mental health and well-being.
Under the UN’s SDG framework, investors and funders now have a clear mandate for which goals matter. As a result, Best Practices are converging to ‘measure what matters’ to provide funders a ‘Scoreboard’ of impact comparisons.
Across the spectrum (private and public sectors), asset managers (institutional, governmental, individual wealth), and non-profit funders are all seeking ways to align with the SDGs. It is estimated that $502 billion global assets under management (AUM) are invested for environmental and social impact, which has grown rapidly each year, based on the 2019 report from Global Impact Investor Network (GIIN).
The lens in which investors view fiduciary responsibility has changed. Free-market-principles and investor/funder fiduciary responsibility now are requiring consideration of SDGs as an opportunity for sustainability and for managing risk.
Augmenting Investment Strategy and Long-term Financial Returns
FIDUCIARY DUTY: Investors must consider all financially material factors when acting in the best interests of beneficiaries, which includes activities that aim to prevent or even combat root causesof systemic risks. Fulfilling fiduciary duty can involve incorporating SDG data that is financially material to investment performance.” (17 Asset Management)
Yet herein lies the greatest opportunity, considering there are now over 2000 signatories with almost $90 trillion AUM worldwide committed to the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), and eventual targeting of the SDGs. This could be the catalyzing force to open the floodgates of investment to meet the UN’s 2030 agenda goals.
What is essentially important as to the SDG investment in-of-itself, is the impact measurement and management (IMM) of alignment with a specific SDG as part of funders goals. Activity in and of itself– e.g. ‘more pharmaceutical drugs sold’ — does not sufficiently represent an impact outcome towards a particular SDG. Funders now have a framework to evaluate outcome along the SDG impact spectrum from –“do no harm” to deep impact contribution.
Constituent Voice is a grounding principle that ascertains the depth of impact and outcomes. From this, patients will have a voice on which treatmentswork. It will also ensure that Greenwashing (activity extrapolated as outcome) doesn’t happen.
As pointed in Part 2 of this blog series, in the U.S. alone, 70% of deaths are caused by chronic conditions, and account for 75% of the $3 trillion yearly spent in healthcare. This is a hefty price to pay for healthcare that isn’t working as intended. For SDG3, the UN estimates the yearly gap in additional investment needed to achieve the 2030 agenda is $140 billion annually. This is an astonishing amount of investment, 3x the amount currently spent each year on healthcare infrastructure.
Logically, it seems the best approach for lowering the trajectory of chronic healthcare costs is to invest in treatments that are sustainable in treating root-causesso that future costs are eliminated, and Patient health is improved. Green Medicine can fill the gap where conventional medicine has had limitations in achieving SDG3 goals for chronic conditions.
We no longer need to rely on the unsustainable prospect of ‘a pill for every ill.’
The call-to-action will be to develop sound metrics and measurement of impact and outcomes that matter in reducing chronic conditions and that are grounded by a systems-biology or Green Medicine methodology.
This Theory of Change implies:
A Scoreboard of Impact Comparisons will demonstrate aligning funding with Green Medicine to achieve SDG3.4 goals will have the biggest impact.
Under this premise, I believe it will be Green Medicine that will drive impact and outcomes towards SDG3 and could potentially lower substantially the UN’s estimate of $140 billion needed annually to meet the 2030 agenda.
Green Medicine that is biologically centered, sustainable in treating root-cause, and non-toxic. Green Medicine alone has the potential to surpass SDG3.4 target goals and reduce healthcare costs dramatically.
The blog will continue to address strategy for how #GreenMedicine is aligned with SDG3.
