Our health sector and the environment

No doubt about there's too much waste, too many materials used, too many chemicals used, too much of everything bad for the environment in the health sector. Think about packaging for pharmaceuticals, every item that any health professional uses wrapped separately, everything needs to be kept sterile, ... I don't want to know how many gallons of sanitizers a hospital goes through in a day, how many dozens of garbage bags it fills, how many pages of papers are printed, ... 

I read an article in the Epoch Times titled "Diabetes and the rise of the machines". I talks about kidney failure and the treatment that follows. There's two main options. One dialysis treatment takes place at home, during the night, where a machine takes on the job your kidney usually does. The patient in the article receives 17 boxes of liquids and tubing, each weighing 35 lbs, each week! The other treatment, called hemodialysis, happens at the hospital, three times per week for 5 hours each. The cost is $60,000 per year per patient. The number of patients has more than tripled in 20 years, from 11,000 in 1990 to 38,000 in 2010 in Canada. The increase is largest in persons above 75 years of age. Kidney transplants are much cheaper but there are not enough donors. 
 
Since I'm not a very empathetic person one of my first thoughts was, "OMG, all that waste". I must admit though that the fact that the couple in the article used to live in the US but returned to Canada because the treatment is here covered by the public health sector was one of the reasons why I did not feel for them. Anyway, the rise in life expectancy is again backfiring. In Africa they'd probably look at this issue in disbelief. With all the health systems in the highly developed countries being overburdened immigration to less developed countries might become a trend one day, as long as the immigrant is healthy obviously.  For the time being somebody has to deal with that overburden. 

Back to my waste issue though. It's going to get worse as our population gets older and seeks medical treatment more frequently. I hear it from my family and it's ridiculous, they are off to the doctor for every little cough. For reasons of sanitation not much is going to change about all the packaging, the sanitizers, the single-use utensils. If hospitals are as bad as schools in Edmonton there will not even be much recycling in place which is a shame. Thinking about right now, I wonder though why there's so much fuss about treating human beings in sterile, clean environments. Animals get treated in the field, on the ground, in the barn, somewhere not so 'clean'. I remember watching young stallions in Iceland being castrated in the backyard of the farmer. Once their best parts were cut off they were, still under sedatives, put back into the field. Done. No fuss, no problem, they all survived without infections. With animals there's also a more sane approach of live and let die which will unfortunately disappear as pets are more and more treated like humans (I doubt they like it) but that's again a different story.