More medical schools are training their students on climate change. This week on Possibly we’re taking a look at how your visit to the doctor might be changing.
Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
When you go to the doctor, they probably weigh you, check your blood pressure, and shine that little light into your eyes. But what if they talked to you about climate change?
It turns out, climate change has a lot to do with our health. And doctors and medical schools are starting to pay attention.
We had Hamid Torabzadeh and Sedi-Anne Blachford from our Possibly Team look into how medical professionals are starting to integrate our changing climate into their practice.
Hamid Torabzadeh: Hi, Megan!
Sedi-Anne Blachford: Hello!
Megan Hall: So, how are doctors responding to climate change?
Hamid Torabzadeh: Before we figure that out, let’s connect the dots on how climate change affects our health. We talked to Dr. Kate Moretti, an emergency medicine doctor at Brown University to learn more.
Dr. Kate Moretti: The impacts of climate change are really widespread, and we see them across many different disease patterns and many different outcomes.
Sedi-Anne Blachford: But sometimes, those effects aren’t especially obvious.
Dr. Kate Moretti: In these really hot summer days you’ll see heat stroke or you’ll see heat stress. That’s what you see on the surface. But then heat will also cause all sorts of exacerbations of chronic illness.
Sedi-Anne Blachford: The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. And one recent study linked 37 percent of heat-related deaths to climate change.
Hamid Torabzadeh: Kate says there’s also the health effects of extreme cold, flooding, breathing in the smoke from more frequent forest fires… the list goes on.
Megan Hall: How do doctors fit into the picture?
Hamid Torabzadeh: Kate says doctors need to understand two things – One- how climate change can impact their patient’s health and Two- how it will change how they practice medicine.
Dr. Kate Moretti: Because if your patient is exposed to heat, right, it affects the metabolism of medications you prescribe, right? So it’s, it affects what you do and how you do it. And it affects how you understand the risk for your patient.
Sedi-Anne Blachford: Kate was part of creating Brown Medical School’s mandatory curriculum about climate change.
Dr. Kate Moretti: It’s not an additional separate thing to learn. It’s additional risk factors. It’s an additional disease modifier. So when you learn about heart disease, right, you also learn about how heat will exacerbate heart disease. So it’s integrated in.
Megan Hall: What do medical students think of this?
Hamid Torabzadeh: We talked to Asghar Shah, a medical student at Brown. He says Kate’s right:
Asghar Shah: In each organ system that we learn about there’s always a way or an interaction between specifically the diseases we’re talking about, how they come about, but then also the changing environment.
Hamid Torabzadeh: In 2022, more than half of all medical schools in the US said they included the health effects of climate change in their required curriculum, more than double the number in 2020.
Megan Hall: It sounds like this is actually gaining traction!
Sedi-Anne Blachford: Absolutely.
Hamid Torabzadeh: And this new curriculum is also teaching doctors how to become more sustainable in how they deliver care.
Dr. Kate Moretti: The US healthcare industry contributes somewhere between 8 and 9 percent of all US carbon emissions.
Hamid Torabzadeh: In short, climate change is changing how doctors practice medicine. As Asghar puts it:
Asghar Shah: At least now at Brown, within the mission of the division of biology and medicine, there is planetary health aspect. The mission now includes to advance knowledge in health and well being of people and the planet.
Hamid Torabzadeh: From understanding new risk factors to trying to reduce medical waste in the health care system, doctors are joining the fight against climate change.
Megan Hall: Got it! Thanks, Hamid and Sedi-Anne!
That’s it for today. For more information, or to ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, go to askpossibly.org Or subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
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Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
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