Linking Cannabis to Wellness; who cares
As a Registered Nurse, I have a platform to speak intelligently about cannabis and wellness but, I do this as an independent practitioner. Few provincial employers will tolerate the knowledge I have to offer. Unless the lesson is about cannabis being a substance of misuse, few provincial programs want to hear from me. Speaking about the need for a paradigm shift in health sector thinking is simply a dead-end narrative within the current health care industry. Sure, there is rhetoric everywhere about wellness, but who is funding it? Most solutions put forward perpetuates the medical model of care, whereas I think governments focusing money on primarily sickness-related programming is ultimately wasteful.
My proposition is simple. While our leaders fail to fund for stable housing, healthy food, proper mental-health support, and multidisciplinary accessible primary care, the burden of caring will remain focused on hospitals. In my mind, hospitals house sickness, not wellness. Long waits in emergency rooms, hallway medicine, and huge pharmaceutical costs will remain the norm. We cannot fix an ailing health care system by continuing to provide reactive funding for a sick society. If we were to apply the truism, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then funding for sickness has run its course. It is time to focus on prevention. It is time to be proactive by making global societal changes bent toward wellness.
This is where nursing science comes to play. If we consider how doctors practice medicine, then we need to understand how nurses practice wellness. When we are hospitalized, it is the nurses who implement the wellness plan. It is the nurse, by the bedside, getting you prepared to function with whatever your new normal may be. Contrary to popular understanding, doctors do not control nursing practice, it is the employer who suppresses the application of nursing science within health care systems. Consider how employers cut housekeeping and nursing positions during the years of austerity; both functions are what keeps a hospital environment thriving. Those cuts are still felt today and we are still immersed in sickness funding envelopes.
Following nursing research, we know life expectancy is directly linked to the social determinants of health, and I have a suggestion. I recommend our leaders explore this research question, “How would society function differently if high school graduates knew intuitively how healthy life choices influence: risks of cancer, cardiac strength, muscle/skeletal growth, finances, sleep patterns, mindfulness, and home ownership?” I think the results of implementing this program would find antidepressants no longer the top money-maker for pharmaceutical companies. I also believe we would see less corporate investment in highly refined foods found in our supermarkets. If our children started their adult lives with an innate understanding of wellness, the cost of their future health care would be less. Instead, we choose to live in a society where it is acceptable for huge multinational companies to make and sell products known to poorly affect our health.
I am a realist, I know government will continue to fund a medical-model-of-care, because the return of investment is quickly calculated. Calculating the ROI on a public school wellness project, such as a national K-12 healthy lifestyle curriculum, designed to progress knowledge, understanding, and application throughout the child’s public-school years, would take a generation to evaluate. Who has the time for that? Yet, the expense of developing a K-12 curriculum is roughly equal to the cost of building one MRI in my small city. I think it is safe to say fewer communities will need an MRI, if our future populations are healthier than they are today.
The reason I am an independent practice nurse is because few, if any, provincial employers truly respect nursing science. Nurses are seen as expenditures. We are expected to simply follow medical orders. When the medical profession says cannabis is not medicine, provincial systems ignore recent research suggesting cannabis, when used as a medicine, creates safer long-term care environments. Cannabis is cheaper than commonly used pharmaceuticals and nurses have been found to spend more time with their residents when cannabis is used as medicine. As an independent nurses, I can try to move the system along by discussing how applying cannabis research will pay dividends using this scenario as an example.
When we consider the ROI, society will eventually pay for wellness one way or another, either up front through investing in prevention, or later through the much higher cost of paying for illness. Unfortunately, sharing deep-seated convictions others may not share, can often bore people. It will not matter the logic, after a while people tire of hearing the soapbox speech, yet again. Thankfully I pay myself and I plan to remain passionate about nursing science. I also plan to continue sharing my musings about cannabis and wellness. I only wished other nurses had the same privilege.
KN