Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Why Oil Matters to Health Care
Last week, my colleague Jake Dunagan discussed value-based movements against plastic manufacturing and noted that "seemingly EVERYTHING in a child's world is plastic—not only bottles, but toys, utensils, diapers, food containers, bathing accessories, etc." Plastic is in practically everything, but not just in a "child's world." As this article from Miller-McCune highlights, the prevalence of plastic-based products in medicine, as part of a broader reliance on cheap oil in medicine, has the potential to send major shockwaves through the health care system.
Medical uses of oil-based products come in both obvious and surprising ways.
U.S. health care relies on cheap crude in multiple ways: from petroleum-derived pharmaceuticals (including such commonly prescribed drugs as aspirin, vitamin capsules, cortisone and many antibiotics, antihistamines, medicated skin creams and psychiatric medications), catheters and syringes to running and transporting high-tech machines and time-is-of-the-essence ambulance runs. This makes for great aseptic single-use equipment and complex, even heroic, surgeries, but it also leaves our medical system highly vulnerable to any disruptions to the oil supply.
While pharmaceuticals can be made without petroleum, many common disposable items like syringes--which were difficult to produce during the 1973 oil shortages--don't share the same manufacturing flexibility. As Howard Frumkin notes (pdf), "much of modern antiseptic practice depends on the use of disposable plastic materials, which are petroleum-based."
None of which is to say that using petroleum-based, disposable plastics is the only conceivable way to sterilize patients. That said, we use plastics and other petroleum products in seemingly everything, and as a result, as Frumkin put it, "It would be good to understand the ways that health care is petroleum-dependent so that we know where we're vulnerable and what we can do better."