Europe’s Medical Students Being Trained to Consider Climate Impact of Inhalers and “Green Prescribing”

From Legal Insurrection

Meanwhile, Association of American Medical Colleges did a survey and found that 55% of medical schools reported that the health effects of climate change were a required topic in their courses.

Posted by Leslie Eastman

While I don’t suffer from asthma, I know friends with children who do. I have seen direction that the use of inhalers are crucial for managing asthma effectively. They deliver medication directly to the lungs, providing faster relief and better control of symptoms.

Yet, in the quest to eliminate “greenhouse gases” based on climate crisis pseudoscience, they were targeted in a study by Stanford Health Care.

Dr. Jyothi Tirumalasetty, M.D., says research is zeroing in on propellants known as HFCs or hydrofluorocarbons. They push the medicine out of the inhaler in measured doses but can also escape into the atmosphere at alarming levels.

“These HFCs are hydrofluorocarbons and propellants, which now we know trap heat in the atmosphere thousands of times more powerfully than carbon dioxide and increase, you know, worse, global warming,” Tirumalasetty said.

She says some inhalers can emit as much greenhouse gas as the average gasoline-powered car driven for 60 miles.

To better understand those levels, Tirumalasetty and her colleagues used safety data and prescription records for inhalers in the U.S. They found traditional devices, known as metered dose inhalers, release the most HFCs — about 98% of the total — but also vary widely from brand to brand.

In fact, in the United Kingdom, doctors have been told to stop ­prescribing blue asthma ­inhalers under National Health Service (NHS) ­guidance that assert the devices cause ­climate change.

Of course inhalers damage the planet. They keep asthmatics alive thus allowing them to continue having a carbon footprint for decades. Your existence is a problem for the managerial class to solve. pic.twitter.com/ksgTdM5owe

— Peter Hague (@peterrhague) November 27, 2024

Even if this gases did everything the “experts” claim, the solar cycles will remain the most significant influence on the planet’s climate. And, I doubt the impact on temperature will negatively impact quality of life as much as the inability to breath.

However, common sense is not preventing European medical schools from pushing senseless climate change priorities and “green prescribing” on their students.

Future doctors will be expected to take the climate impact of inhalers into account, medical school leaders have said.
They will also have more training on how to recognise and treat heatstroke, while mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will become a more prominent part of the curriculum at European medical schools.

Insiders stressed that the curriculum is yet to be finalised and advice surrounding inhalers is just one option that could be considered.

The initiative – overseen by the European Network on Climate and Health Education, which is made up of a group of 25 medical schools led by the University of Glasgow – will bring climate lessons into the curriculum of more than 10,000 students.

…Students will be taught “green prescribing”, in which doctors should encourage patients to take up activities such as community gardening and tree planting. This is alongside “active travel”, which includes walking or cycling rather than driving. Both activities offer health benefits to individuals while being positive for the environment.

But, not to worry: The cost of the inhalers will be price-capped by Big Pharma.

The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has agreed to cap out-of-pocket costs for climate friendly asthma inhalers at $35, a move applauded by lawmakers for having potential benefits on the environment and patients.

The news follows an investigation by POLITICO’s E&E News into how developing emissions-free inhalers could help AstraZeneca and another inhaler-maker, GlaxoSmithKline, undermine competition for at least a decade by bringing old medications under new patent protection.

AsrtaZeneca and GSK are currently developing the so-called green inhalers, which don’t rely on hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, as propellants to push the medicine into patients’ lungs, like conventional inhalers.

As a reminder, HFCs were originally used as replacement gases for those that were identified as depleting the ozone.

These “climate-friendly inhalers” could work as well as the others, but the choice of medication should be made between the doctor and patient and not based on recommendations from agenda-driven eco-activists. The only calculation that should be made whether the devices deliver the correct amount of medication to the user in a timely fashion at a reasonable cost.

And while the European medical schools are instituting these programs, it must be noted that the Association of American Medical Colleges did a survey and found that 55% of medical schools reported that the health effects of climate change were a required topic in their courses in 2022. That doubled from 27% two years prior.

The trend lines do not look positive for those who prefer to make human health and comfort a priority.

As the Director of Education and Policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE) and Assistant Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Basu has led the creation of a new interdisciplinary climate change and planetary health concentration that will launch this fall and be available to every student at the school.

“We see the benefits of having individuals with very diverse disciplinary backgrounds and lived experiences think and learn and create climate solutions together,” he says.

As Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Basu has helped insert climate change into every aspect of the four-year curriculum. He describes and evaluates this process in a new paper, published May 29 in PLOS Climate, called “Climate Change, Environment, and Health: The Implementation and Initial Evaluation of a Longitudinal, Integrated Curricular Theme and Novel Competency Framework at Harvard Medical School.”

Hopefully, we can reverse this trend so people return to being the priority.