What happens when medicine leaves interconnectedness and complexity behind?

I read a great book last year that I highly recommend called “The Ecology of Care”, by Didi Pershouse.

In Chapter one, she talks about what happens when we leave resiliency, interconnectedness and complexity behind. Here is an excerpt from her book;

“The idea of isolating parts, which has guided most scientific pursuits, has also allowed us to imagine that we can isolate our own health from the health of our environment.

One could forget, in a twenty-minute consult with a patient, which sitting indoors, that health is much larger than the body.

One could forget, while talking to a cancer patient, that the incinerators of medical waste have until recently been one of the major causes of cancer-causing dioxins in the environment.

One could forget, when writing a prescription for a middle-age man for a cholesterol-lowering drug, that the pharmaceuticals you prescribe are peed out and persist in the water table, where they act as reproductive inhibitors for the swans and loons, porcupines and otters that all live near waterways.

One could forget that the anti-psychotic you prescribe for one patient persists in the “purified” drinking water of the next patient – creating interesting side effects for those drinking from a city water system.

One could forget that if Inuit mothers living far from any factories have high levels of pollutants in their breast milk, then the pregnant mother in front of you can’t protect her health just by getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising – she is part of an unhealthy system”

The point is, when we change everything around us (the biology, chemistry, physics and genetics), we change the natural systems we rely on for health and survival.

The interconnectedness of life is profound; and as Didi says, we need to adapt our forms of caring for one another to take all these aspects into account.