FEATURED PROJECT
The Upstream Health Project
WELCOME
My intention with Upstream Health Project is to demonstrate the fundamental importance of looking ‘upstream’ when trying to understand how to improve both health and medical care.
By ‘upstream’ I mean to explore and document how health issues are deeply shaped by broad social, economic and environmental conditions that occur long before disease, disability and death happen.
"You are downstream on the bank of a beautiful river… you jump in and pull people, one after another, out of the water. This is what happens when we focus on problems downstream."
Now imagine a different scenario: you are upstream, building safety nets and guardrails so that far fewer people fall in the water at all. In health care, those guardrails are policies ensuring equity in income, education, race and gender.
The Upstream Health Project asks us to look beyond immediate symptoms and diagnoses to the fundamental causes of illness — income inequality, housing stability, social isolation, access to education, employment, racism, and the structure of our health care systems themselves.
MISSION STATEMENT
- Modern medicine is highly effective at treating acute conditions, whether due to disease or accidents.
- Modern medicine has extended lives through innovations in surgical practice, medication prescription, early detection and early intervention, and much more.
- The medical development of vaccines has saved millions of lives over generations.
- However, modern medicine does not address the conditions that foster disease and disability in the first place.
- Housing insecurity, poverty, occupational stability, income sufficiency, environmental exposure, labour conditions, education, neighbourhood quality, access to greenspace, and food affordability exert a greater influence on health outcomes than most medical interventions. These are called the social determinants of health (SDOH).
- All of these policies affect people who differ in gender identity, sexuality, age, racialization status, ethnic status and other individual characteristics uniquely.
- Yet these social forces often remain backgrounded, medicalized, or treated as irrelevant to health itself.
- Upstream Health was created to make those forces visible — to talk about them and to take them seriously.
- Medicalization (or hyper-medicine) is the context within which both physical and mental health are understood. In a highly individualistic and capitalist society, accountability is often couched as being healthy — and blame placed on the individual sick person for being ill.
- While we are in Canada and often cite Canadian research, the arguments made have global relevance in modern advanced societies characterized by allopathic medical dominance.