The Amish & Health

How do Amish pay medical bills, if they don’t have health insurance? We get a look at how some Amish handle this in a new piece on Cincinnatti Public Radio. Amish famously do not use commercial health insurance, opting to rely on their own churches and extended communities when the need is great. And while a “pass-the-hat” approach may have been more common in the…

The Health & Well-Being In Amish Society Conference took place a little over a month ago. I’ve finally gotten around to putting together some photos and highlights from the event to share with you today. The event took place on the beautiful Elizabethtown College campus. Here is Leffler Chapel, where the main speakers delivered their presentations. There were around 200 attendees; many seemed to be…

Amish typically do not become doctors and nurses, but they do help save lives in other ways. For one, there is the Amish involvement in fire companies, particularly in Lancaster County, but not only there. Amish also work as Emergency Medical Technicians. Sisters Miriam and Karen Schlabach of Baltic, Ohio, are doing just that. From the Sugarcreek Budget (no longer online): Miriam’s journey to EMT…

TIME Magazine has an article called “Amish People Stay Healthy in Old Age. Here’s Their Secret.” It starts with some interesting info I’d never seen before: The average American life expectancy is currently just under 79 years. Back in 1900, it was only 47, but for early–20th century Amish it was already greater than 70. I don’t know the source of this, but let’s take…

Amish carriers of a gene mutation live about 10 years longer on average than others in their community without the mutation. They also appear to be “completely protected from the development of diabetes”, according to the study’s lead researcher. This story is going around the internet like gangbusters now. The discovery was made by scientists from Northwestern University: The first genetic mutation that appears to…

Do Amish farm children hold the key to preventing asthma? For some time now, the Amish have been known to have lower rates of asthma. But in a new academic paper released yesterday (New England Journal of Medicine), researchers have discovered a key difference in Amish children, who typically grow up on small family farms reliant on horsepower, and Hutterite children, who live on large…

The Ortman Chiropractic Clinic can be found in the small town of Canistota in southeastern South Dakota. As described in this piece in Mennonite World Review (“For Amish, long trip to chiropractor can be fun”), the clinic is noteworthy for the many Amish and other Anabaptist people it draws: The Ortman Clinic, which celebrated its centennial in 2015, has been attracting Amish patients for 70 years. Today Amish, plus…

Trying to talk about the “Amish approach” to health care is nothing if not complex. For one, with diverse churches and individual differences, you really can’t say there is a single “Amish approach”. But one thing is for sure – many Amish people, admirably, care about their health. That’s the conclusion you have to draw after observing the efforts they put forth to get, and…

Cost, comfort and other factors influence where an Amish family decides to have its babies. We’ve previously looked at Amish-friendly birthing centers and home birth as popular options. But many Amish mothers in fact do what most English families do, and welcome their new bundles of joy in conventional hospitals. This Hillsdale Daily News article was written, in part, to report on the first birth of 2015 at the Hillsdale Community…