Human Health

Vance Cook 4/27/2020 Environment and Society In response to the recent national holiday, Earth Day, I have been interested in what ways the Earth, our home, interacts with us humans, and how humans interact with the Earth. This symbolic interaction is quite diverse across the globe, yet people are all interacting, on some level, with their environment around them. People interact with their environment in different ways, and the environment interacts with people in different ways as well. This thought is what influenced me in choosing a topic to talk about for my final blog post. In thinking of the different ways people interact with their environment, some negative interactions come to mind; one thing in particular is the overall human contribution to pollution of the environment. Pollution happens all across the globe, and has been happening for hundreds of years. After long periods of this, I feel that those effects are now coming full circle. Our long term pollution habi

I have just completed watching the film, Understanding the Opioid Epidemic. It is a documentary published by PBS that covers the issue of the opioid epidemic here in the U.S. The documentary covers a growing epidemic in our nation. Opioid prescription is directly linked with several health related issues such as drug use, drug related suicide, and rates of psychological disorders, yet doctors prescribe them so often. I was shocked to find out about this issue because doctor prescribed pain medications are so common in the United States, and to hear that this was contributing to a load of negative consequences in our society was a little baffling. My whole life, it has been a norm for doctors to prescribe pain medications if you have a surgery or painful treatments. The dentist uses laughing gas to numb the pain so children can sit through getting a cavity filling. Because of the norm built around pain medication, its use is so common and many people are becoming addicted to the pain m