Maya Earls, E&E News reporter
Published: Monday, December 23, 2019
A new survey has found that few medical schools incorporate climate change into their curricula.
Despite the threat climate change poses to human health, very few medical schools have made it a part of their coursework.
The International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations recently conducted a survey of medical schools in 118 countries. Of the medical schools reviewed, the IFMSA found 15.9% have made climate change a part of their curricula.
Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor and climate change researcher at the Harvard Global Health Institute, said she was not surprised by the results. Through her work at Harvard, she has tried to incorporate climate change into the teachings of U.S. medical schools.
Salas said the survey shows there is an opportunity to train the next generation of physicians so they have the skills necessary to practice in a future where global warming affects every aspect of their jobs.
“Climate change is truly that threat multiplier,” she said. “It impacts, in my opinion, every facet of how we practice medicine.”
The health impacts of climate change are numerous. More days with extreme heat could account for an increase of 1 million deaths each year in India alone (Climatewire, Nov. 1). Wildfires, which are also predicted to increase, pose a threat to people with respiratory conditions (Climatewire, Dec. 16). And the changing climate is exposing more people to vector-borne diseases such as Zika and Lyme (Climatewire, Oct. 30).
Sheri Weiser, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said her own interest in climate change was spurred by research into food insecurity. The more she studied the subject, the more she found the issue was significantly exacerbated by climate change.
For example, an August study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found increased climate shocks could reduce gains that have been made in lowering the rates of stunting caused by poor childhood nutrition. The United Nations also issued a report that found the number of people suffering from hunger in 2018 reached an eight-year high due to economic, political and climate-related factors.
Weiser is now a leader in incorporating climate change into the university’s curriculum.
“One of the biggest barriers is competing priorities,” she said. “And how to add content without taking away content.”
Medical school curriculum by nature is always changing to include new research. An Association of American Medical Colleges survey of 147 medical schools in 2017-2018 found 34.7% were planning to make a curriculum change in the future. The survey found 30.6% of schools already had a curriculum change in the process.
There are natural fits in the curriculum to bring climate change into the conversation, according to Weiser. For example, the study of infectious disease presents an opportunity to discuss how more people could be affected.
Salas echoed that idea, saying that schools can add climate change to lessons of asthma and other conditions.
“My approach is all they need to do is add a climate lens to what they’re already teaching,” she said.
The smarter doctors know from studying epidemiology that establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables in complex systems is pretty difficult. https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/83/10/792.pdf
So they will know that the null hypothesis in climate change (volatility in climate parameters is due to natural causes) has not been disproven by the theory that tiny changes in trace gases are important.
In medicine as in other data-based professions, the climate change believers are in the not-very-bright category. The smart ones are ignoring the issue and getting on with more important matters.
I thought medical schools were supposed to alleviate hypochondria, not promote it.
+42
Best comment in thread.
But Tom, promoting hypochondria means more ‘need’ for medical treatment – so more need for (well-remunerated) doctors . . .
Auto
Patient Earth is a mystery case for medical professionals. Practically no symptoms. Maybe little fever: +0,8 C in 140 years. Very small sea level rise. No more storms, floods or droughts or bush fires than usually. Nothing life threatening.
Laboratory tells that CO2 levels have risen in the last 40 years but they are just above dangerously low level of 180 ppm. Water levels in air, clouds and ice sheets are within normal variations.
Cure: 3 trillion dollar likely ineffective CO2 reduction program that has not even been tested. It has UN pledge level approval and only the rich countries need to pay.
This makes about as much sense as saying that doctors in Albany, NY need to be trained differently than those in NYC because the weather is different.
Since I’m not certain what my symptoms would be if I am suffering from an un-diagnosed case of ‘global warming’, maybe I should go to the emergency room and request an exam and a prescription for medical weed. I’ll tell them I read on the internet that they are not trained properly per Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor and climate change researcher at the Harvard Global Health Institute. I just hope they don’t over prescribe my dosage and make fat and sleepy!
Salas said the survey shows there is an opportunity to train the next generation of physicians so they have the skills necessary to practice in a future where global warming affects every aspect of their jobs. – article
Okay, but what EVER will she do if it gets cooler, instead?
There’s a danger not mentioned in this article, and that is the appearance of eastern equine encephalitis on this continent. Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) was not transmissible to humans, but could easily move from one horse to another by mosquitoes carrying that bug, which could kill a horse by dehydration alone within 24 hours of contracting it. EEE is transmissible to humans, and has no cure. So far, it is rare, but it does come from the tropics. If we come into a cooling climate and long spells of colder weather, this may impair the spread of it, but this, along with zika fever and a few other nasty tropical bugs, like the warm weather that helps them spread. So is this doctor – this Emergency Room doctor???? — aware that tropical diseases like EEE are rare but can still be found and humans can catch them?
I’d frankly prefer more cold weather if it means the bugs that carry these nasty critters aren’t available.
The Theory of Global Warming, Climate Change and Evolution have no practical effect on the practice of Medicine and thus the Medical Schools concentrate their attention onto relevant matters.
The fact of evolution is pretty useful in many little ways, starting from understanding genetics, nutrition, human behaviour, limits of human performance, to name a few. I see no good sides in a creationist doctor.
A university education must be close to worthless at this point.
Still available at Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20160324210832/http://www.thenursingbible.com/apocalypse/
Thanks for publishing this, I will avoid any doctor mentioned or any doctor trained at one of the 15% of medical colleges with a global warming curriculum. I wonder at what global temp all this special training will kick in with benefits. Where I live (PI) the temp is seldom below 75F at night and most days in upper 80s/low90s. Local docs seem to deal with it without special training and natives are multiplying like rabbits. Life is good where it is warm.
As a doctor, I studied the climate consensus science closely. My teachers had taught me to be skeptical of science consensus, because in medicine the consensus is so often wrong. I had grown up during the global cooling scam. As a doctor, I was able to analyse the original papers, not that easy as it was outside my fields. I had to study Ehrlich in post grad, and even then his predictions had failed.
So I am now a confirmed sceptic. WUTU and Climate Audit helped enormously, thankyou.
Not all doctors follow the Climate Change religion. I will also avoid any doctor who does.
As another one, I would remind all that dealing in global average temperature conveniently distracts everyone enough to overlook the fact that self-regulating tropical regions of the globe changed but little while subarctic regions incurred the bulk of both 20th century warmings, and as largely beneficial modest elevations of their nightly lows somewhat elevating those daily averages.
All this hysteria over myriads of overheated humans is misplaced, having long historically recurred periodically as short term weather variation. Neither unprecedented nor permanent. Send in the next patient, please.
So without climate change training how will our young physicians distinguish regular heatstroke from climate change heatstroke? How will they know how to treat climate change frostbite when they only know regular frostbite? And how will they distinguish climate change malaria from regular malaria?
Well the climate induced versions will be so much more extreme … it’s an emergency 🙂
I am sure there is a grant in there for some struggling grad student to study that and on the gravy train rolls.
I have a friend who actually experienced climate change. He lives in San Francisco and went skiing at Lake Tahoe on the weekend.
High IQ professionals trained to deal with reality get no training in a political scam. FTFY.
It is a scam and it is shameful. The goal is to “litmus test” med school candidates. Let’s keep the “wrong sorts of people” out of medicine.
Applicants to teach at UC Berkeley and other colleges around the US are now having their views on “diversity and inclusiveness” scored by a rubric (online link below) to evaluate their moral fitness. (WSJ Opinion, Dec. 19)
It isn’t just universities. Want to be an educator? Better read up on “what you need to know”
Rubric to Assess Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/rubric_to_assess_candidate_contributions_to_diversity_equity_and_inclusion.pdf?mod=article_inline
Bicycle Repair Rare In Fish School Curriculum
If Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet , has anything to do with it, all future medical studies will include obligatory climate impact elements.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/12/23/the-lancet-on-health-and-climate-change-a-tale-of-editorial-bias/
Already Sheffield University has compulsory climate modules in all its courses, including those for medicine.
A new survey has found that few medical schools incorporate climate change into their curricula.
That’s an outrage. It should have been *no* medical schools incorporating climate change into their curricula.
Regardless of how real or fake you think man-caused climate change is. Treatment for medical conditions are based on the medical conditions themselves not on whether or not the medical conditions are indirectly caused by one thing or another. A patient comes in with severe burns (for example) it doesn’t matter if the “wildfire” that burned them was “caused” by climate change or not, you treat the burns the same regardless.
This is such unbelievable rubbish as to be scarcely credible.
Why?
Well: I relocated from Glasgow UK, to Oxford UK in 1993, 7 years after relocating from Cambridge UK to Glasgow.
There is a temperature difference between Glasgow and Oxbridge of around 1C give or take.
Now I shifted climate of 1C in 1 day, not forty years.
Did I die?
NO.
Did I suffer illness? No.
Did I adjust seamlessly?
Yes.
There is no risk to human health through a 1C change in climate.
Just like birds which migrate from Africa to the north of Scotland somehow manage to cope with rather different temperatures too.
Our bodies can adapt to changes of up to 50C a year, certainly 35C most years in the UK. We do not die as a result.
Better societal adaptation is to say: ‘go on holiday in Cornwall, not the Med: then you might not get malignant melanoma!’ That is nothing to do with climate change, more to do with idiotic tourists not taking basic precautions to protect sensitive skin from intense sunlight.
A bit like if you go skiing in |Zermatt in January, best to buy some long johns, thermal shirts and decent ski pants.
Doctors presumably study tropical diseases because they may treat patients returning from the tropics. If the world gets warmer they may see the same diseases occurring closer to home. The diseases will be the same, just the distribution may change. In the UK there are reports of more ticks carrying dog diseases not native to the UK but how much of this is due to warming and how much to the increased numbers of travelling pets I do not know.
Fair hypotheses to make.
How could one go about confirming this?
NOT leading question.