It's the Water

Years ago Olympia Beer had the slogan, "It's the Water" -- suggesting its delectable beer came from its excellent water.

Although Miller closed this brewery in 2003, I recently remembered the slogan while taking a course called "Leadership in Green Health Care", through Teleosis Institute in Berkeley, CA. It educates physicians about the link between our environment, medicine, and human health. The whole idea of "Sustainable Medicine" is to provide better health care while also protecting our limited environmental and medical resources. It's an up-and-coming trend, I hope.

Part of the course involved learning about all the medicines in our water supplies . . . including Prozac, Zoloft, and Lipitor. Did you know your personal metabolic by-products can survive waste-treatment plants and end up in rivers, lakes, and oceans?

An even larger culprit is the practice of flushing unused medicines down the toilet. Did your doctor or pharmacist ever tell you to do this?

There must be some un-depressed fish with low cholesterol swimming in our streams, rivers, and oceans these days. Maybe they're having their endocrine and neurological systems rearranged in other ways too. And then we eat them. hmmm . . . . could there be a problem here?

There's a brief podcast on Marketplace about this issue, also mentioning medicine take-back programs being set up in various cities so that this kind of pollution won't happen. The medicines can be incinerated so they don't impact marine life. Of course, drug companies feel this is much ado about nothing -- could it be because they might have to pay for ways to avoid polluting water supplies with their products? hmmmm . . .

Personally, I like clean water. And, I vote for staying as healthy as we can so we need less medicine in the first place.