Connection Between Material Matters and Good Health

Subject: Healthcare Research
Pages: 4
Words: 872
Reading time:
4 min
Study level: Bachelor

One of important daily matters for every person is the care for one’s health. People strive a lot in order to improve it; however, this is closely connected to material matters as good health is impossible without due financial supply. Nowadays the world is built like this – money matters everywhere. You can buy anything if you have money, and good health is not an exception. When it comes to the health matters money means more than anything; in health care people may only get what they pay for: if you have money, you may have an access to the best hospitals and other medical establishments; you can also use the best gyms and have the best healthy and balanced diet. And these are the main points for the person to be healthy. Generally, it seems that without money even something that people receive when they are born including good health can be lost under the influence of bad factors from outer world.

Discussing the issue of healthcare and its connection to financial supply on a daily basis, it should be stated that not all people would agree with the fact that health is all about money, and they would probably be right as it is also connected to the way the person takes care about oneself, it also depends on how diligent the person is in the health related matters; but still, one may want to have good health, and strive to accomplish this goal and it will appear that all the roads in healthcare lead to significant financial expenses. There also exist numerous cases when person’s life is actually impossible without money. How often we hear that this or that person died because of having no money to pay for the medical service. In so many countries in the world health care is only possible when you can pay for it. Here is some experience. One patient in the US, let me call her Linda, needed a surgery on a tumor, but she could not afford it, and died at a young age of twenty four as a result (Mccoppin 12). Admittedly, no money – no honey; even the person’s life largely depends on money, and how much more is the good health then.

Further, the way the lack of money affects people’s health is especially evident in poor countries. How many times we hear about the sad situation in poor areas of Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, India and so on. People in those countries are so poor that they are not able to provide for themselves in a due way, and, thus, have to suffer from many diseases. The painful fact stands out: ‘Poverty is dangerous to your health!’ Though there are numerous reasons for this, it is evident that one main cause of poor health is poverty. Often poverty becomes a sentence for a person to have an inadequate shelter marked by the its failure to meet the sanitary norms, lack of safe and sufficient water, and being overcrowded and with cramped living conditions. These three factors actually promote serious diseases including severe infections and varied inflammations in different zones of a human body. Add to this malnutrition which weakens the body’s defenses against sickness, and you can see why poverty does to health what termites do to wood.

Next, not even poor countries suffer health problems as they have not enough money to solve the problem, the UK as well. Bedkober stated that:

In the nationalized British health system, each year about 9,000 patients fail to receive renal dialysis or a kidney transplant and die as a result, about 15,000 cancer patients and 17,000 heart patients fail to receive up-to-date treatment and 7,000 elderly patients are denied hip replacements. At the end of 2001, 43,900 British patients, many of them needing hip or knee replacements, had been waiting for more than a year for surgery. The London-based Adam Smith Institute estimates that people currently on the NHS waiting lists will collectively wait about one million years longer to receive treatment than doctors deem acceptable. (36)

Concerning this close connection between money and the good health, it can be stated that health is just one more commodity which can be bought and, thus, is all about money.

Responding to those who think that money cannot be given such a principal role in the healthcare related matters, it is worth to mention that they are partially correct. Actually, money is only a means for reaching this goal, and what is the most important is the person’s active position and the desire to be health which is, in its turn, supported by money. Thus, without a doubt, people who have few money can also fight for their health; at least when it comes to the diet and healthy way of living, like active life style, regular exercises, having no bad habits and so on, but still everything mentioned above gives strong reason to believe that money and good health are closely connected.

In conclusion, such daily matter as our healthcare is closely connected to the individual’s material supply. Everything in the modern day reality is subjected to the laws of materialism and financial dependence including the health related matters.

Works Cited

Bedkober, B. (2007). Who’s Afraid of American Health Care? Review – Institute of Publik Affairs, Mar.2007: 36-48.

Mccoppin, R. (2009). When the Economy Affects Your Health. Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL): 12-14.