ecoyear

Although my focus is on food - specifically, what kind of food can we find and eat in a "powerdown" scenario, where energy availability to grow fertilizer and pesticide/herbicide intensive crops is reduced and also the possibility of relying on food from far away (say, California) is also drastically reduced - this section will deal with my more traditional area of expertise, medicine.

I graduated from medical school in Montreal, Canada in 1987, and did a three-year residency in family medicine at Brown University from 1987 to 1990.  I worked in community health centers for 20 years, first in Lawrence, Massachussets, then in the San Francisco Bay Area (mostly in a clinic serving mainly homeless people in San Francisco, Tom Waddell Health Center), and in San Mateo County.  In the last few years, I have worked for community health centers in the Greater Denver metro area, and in my present hometown, Boulder.

Somewhere in there, I took two years off for a masters in public health, with focus in maternal and child care.  My interest was in parenting and specifically prevention of child abuse.  During the second year, I focused on a preventive medicine residency, studied unexpected child deaths in San Francisco, learned much about how income disparities and public health campaigns impact child deaths, and went back to work serving homeless families and other homeless folks in San Francisco.

I admit I do not know much about "alternative" medicine, other than the simple fact that we all care about people and believe that the human mind can do much to influence, heal or hurt the human body, and that the practitioner had better know how to use that to the patient's advantage.

I am curious as to how Peak Oil will affect the practice of medicine. It is under siege as we speak.  First it costs too much, second many people have lost faith in the rushed opinions and lack of bedside skills of some doctors. What happens when there is no money in the system for anything remotely like what we have today?

I am not that interested in figuring out the ways in which the medical system we have relies on far-flung suppliers. I think though that as we begin to feel a greater sense of empowerment around growing our own food, making our own clothes and other essentials, even generating some of our own energy, then we will want to understand as much about the human body (in health and illness) as we can. In an energy-constrained world, we can only hope there will still be some place for "specialists", because otherwise we will surely regress tremendously, but that doesn't mean we can't all be a lot more savvy than we are now.

So read on, as I find a way to teach some of what I have learned.