With health insurance and conventional health care costs spiraling upward, changes are happening in both how conventional health care is delivered and the increasing use of alternative or health care to save money.
Health care is being provided from a distance. For example, online doctors and telephone triage nurses, opening opportunities to work at home for a growing number of professionals. To do this, a professional may work independently or be employed by a major health insurance companies who are providing online services. Telemedicine is another way that health care is being delivered to remote locations.
People are using more alternative or supplementary health care, spending $40 billion dollars a year on such things as:
- Acupuncture
- Biofeedback
- Chinese medicine
- Chiropractic
- Homeopathy
- Hypnosis
- Massage and body work
- Naturopathy
- Yoga
The appeal of alternative medicine has been to supplement conventional medicine, but an increasing number of patients appear to be seeking it to save money. Most of these types of practice can be located in home salons, taken directly to the homes and work places of clients, or provided in rented office space, at health clinics, salons, spas, or hospitals. Check out the licensing requirements in your state. You may be able to find sites that link to requirements in all states, such as there is for acupuncture and massage.
Massage and Bodywork
Massage stands out as one of the best opportunities. You see massage therapists’ chairs and tables at airports, art shows, doctors’ offices, gyms, health clubs, health food stores, resorts, salons, shopping malls, spas, sporting events, work places, in hospices, hospitals, locker rooms, nurseries, storefronts, and on cruise ships and movie sets. One of the reasons massage has becomes well established are findings such one by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health, which found that one session of massage causes biological changes that relieve aches and pains, reduce stress, and assist in physical rehabilitation, reducing the need for pain medication, helping teenagers with emotional problems, making colicky infants less irritable and the elderly more alert, and even increasing student math scores. One can specialize, such as serving menopausal and peri-menopausal women who often suffer from severely tight neck and shoulder muscles, general tension, and anxiety. To learn more about the earnings and massage industry, check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics information and national massage associations, such as the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) and the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals (ABMP).
Bodywork in its many forms is booming. It has been called the coffee break of the millennium. Some of the forms it is available in are cranial sacral therapy, energy healing, Feldenkrais, Hellerwork, lymphatic drainage, polarity therapy, Reflexology, Reiki, Rolfing, Shiatsu, sports massage, Trager, and trigger-point or neuromuscular therapy, to name a few. Each of these modalities has one or more treatment aims, ranging from relaxation to dealing with specific maladies.
Yoga
Yoga’s popularity for relieving stress-related conditions and fitness provides a livelihood for many teachers and can be taught at studios, by going to clients’ homes and workplaces, offering it at resorts. In ten years, the number of people practicing yoga increased from about 4 million in 2001 to 20 million in 2011. For more information about yoga, check out the resources and surveys at The Yoga Site and the Yoga Journal magazine.
Health Care Vital to the Emergence of Sustainable Communities
That health care is being delivered in person in local communities is critical to the emergence of sustainable local communities that can sustain themselves, particularly since the cost of transportation itself is forbidding to an increasing number of people. So if you already a health practitioner or are thinking of a health career, working in a local community can both provide you with a sustainable livelihood and contribute to the community becoming sustainable.
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