The National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) held a documentary screening event this past Friday, and it wasn’t your typical evening at the theater. StudentsAWARE (Students Actively Working to Advance Real Equity), a community-action group based at NCNM, organized this film screening and discussion in collaboration with the Multnomah County Health Equity Initiative, order to increase awareness in the NCNM community about how health, wealth and race are inextricably intertwined. The result was a night to remember. It was an in-depth look at health inequity in our country, and it forced viewers to consider how underlying social factors contribute to illness and disease.
One of the missions of the NCNM AWARE group is to:
“promote excellence in natural medicine by providing culturally and linguistically appropriate education and health care.”
This documentary screening of the California News Reel’s “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making us Sick?” was the first of many educational seminars to come, focused on cultural awareness and social medicine. The screening was followed by small group discussions which allowed for open communication amongst medical students, faculty and staff regarding the issues that practitioners of alternative medicine face in their practices.
These discussion groups helped to build bridges between members of this alternative medicine community, and allowed them to brainstorm ideas about how to understand the implication of the distribution of wealth in our society, and to catalyze their ideas of true health equity into action. The facilitator line-up included a handful of local activists. Lenore Norrgard and Macceo Pettis from the organization Uniting to Understand Racism; Claudia Al-Amin, a chaplain from the DOC with a long history of local activism; and Ben Duncan from the Multnomah County Health Initiative led the group discussions. Powerful and honest dialogue was brought forth in these small groups, allowing students, faculty, staff and community members of NCNM to process what they saw in the documentary, and reflect on the role of the alternative medicine professions in addressing health disparities.
Many studies outlined in the film described how environmental and psychological circumstances influence the level of stress for an individual, and thus affect a person’s ability to fight illness and disease. Social scientists have found that lack of control over the day-to-day events in one’s life can make someone more susceptible to illness. And it makes sense really. Stress can be the uncertainty of where the next meal will come from, or if a housing or work situation will continue to be stable, these lifestyle insecurities can wear on a person.
The stress response and its inherent increase in cortisol levels lead to decreased immune function and an inability to handle the delicate interactions of glucose and insulin. 
High cortisol levels interact with brain chemistry, literally hard-wiring this conditioning into its neural networking. The interplay of these social stresses and the resulting physical effects increase the risk of chronic disease, such as diabetes and heart disease, and greatly influence a person’s ability to make impactful lifestyle changes.
In our society, poverty kills. For every major cause of death, from heart disease to stroke to diabetes, the number of people affected by these conditions increases as you move down the socioeconomic ladder. Moreover, in this country, a person’s income, education, and neighborhood status can be used to predict how long they will live. That simply should not be. The link between health and wealth in this society is strong, and outcomes are predictable based on the tip of the scales in either direction. All of these issues are essential for medical students to understand in order to provide the best health care possible.
The current health care system is not meeting the needs of many, is not sustainable, and does not contribute to a healthy and productive society. It is important that we as concerned citizens, and especially and health care practitioners, increase our awareness of these factors, and really think about what our social responsibility is. AWARE is certainly making true change happen, planting their seeds of change in the soil of the NCNM community, and in turn influencing the way that future alternative health practitioners practice health care.
For more information about this topic, check out the article entitled: Health is More Than Health Care.