{"id":73110,"date":"2021-10-11T07:45:44","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T12:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=73110"},"modified":"2021-10-11T07:45:44","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T12:45:44","slug":"73110","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=73110","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

BMJ Urges Doctors to Cut Back on Treatment Because Climate Change<\/a><\/p>\n

Doctors should think less about the health of their patients and more about the health of the planet, an editorial in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) has urged.<\/p>\n

The editorial, published as part of a\u00a0special edition\u00a0<\/a>dedicated to the forthcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, says that medical treatment contributes significantly to \u201cgreenhouse gas emissions\u201d and that this carbon footprint can be reduced if only \u201chealth professionals\u201d can learn to reduce \u201coverdiagnosis\u201d and \u201covertreatment\u201d.<\/p>\n

Healthcare contributes 4-5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.\u00a0In the NHS, 62 per cent of these emissions are from its supply chains and 24 per cent from delivery of care. Health professionals can be institutional leaders who drive decarbonisation in hospitals through reducing overdiagnosis and overtreatment in healthcare, eliminating waste, streamlining services, and better managing suppliers and procurement. All of these efforts will bring us closer to making healthcare more sustainable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the bigger problems, a\u00a0separate piece<\/a>\u00a0argues, is all those pesky suspected cancer patients who tiresomely insist on getting as early a diagnosis as possible. They need to learn to wait, argues one Rammya Mathew:<\/p>\n

The pressure to diagnose cancers earlier and earlier is another major contributor to modern medicine\u2019s carbon footprint. Over successive years we\u2019ve been told to continually lower our threshold for suspecting cancer, and we\u2019re encouraged to investigate sooner and more extensively. In primary care, most patients with mildly elevated or even high normal platelet counts now undergo a barrage of investigations in case thrombocytosis is an early indicator of underlying cancer. What does the yield of these tests have to be to make this an acceptable approach? And shouldn\u2019t we be considering the environmental impact of putting so many patients on a conveyor belt of investigations, as part of cost-benefit calculations?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But hey, why stop at letting the occasional undiagnosed cancer patient die? What we should really be doing is forcing everyone to go vegan and make everyone travel by bicycle\u2026<\/p>\n

Adopting the largely plant based planetary health diet\u00a0and taking most journeys using a combination of walking, cycling, and public transport would substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve our health.<\/p>\n

Animal sourced foods (meat, dairy, fish) generally use much more land and water and create more greenhouse gases than plant sourced food. Sustainable and healthy diets consist largely of diverse plant foods with low amounts of animal source foods, unsaturated rather than saturated fats, and limited amounts of refined grains, highly processed foods, and added sugars. The nature and scale of change required depends on existing dietary patterns and nutritional status of local populations.\u00a0For example, to meet the planetary health diet recommendations, average meat consumption in Africa can slightly increase (2 per cent), whereas in North America and Europe it needs to fall by 79 per cent and 68 per cent, respectively.<\/p>\n

Sustainable land travel will involve substantially fewer journeys by car and more journeys taken by foot, bicycle, and public transport, ensuring that all transport is carbon neutral and powered by renewable energy.\u00a0This requires a transformation of the energy sector and transport infrastructure, prioritising active and public transport over road building. Estimates of the nature and scale of change needed vary. In the UK, for example, a central net zero pathway includes car mileage per driver falling by 10 per cent by 2050, whereas other analysis calls for a reduction between 20 per cent and 60 per cent by 2030, depending on the speed of transition to electric vehicles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Old fashioned types who imagine doctors should be concentrating on healthcare rather than engaging in environmental activism may be puzzled by this. But they shouldn\u2019t be. The Climate Industrial Complex \u2014 and the sinister billionaire backers behind it, such as the World Economic Forum \u2014 has run a hugely successful gaslighting operation in which schools, universities, the entertainment industry, big business, and the mainstream media now broadcast nothing but environmental scare stories. Any stories providing evidence that the global warming scare has been massively overblown are ruthlessly suppressed.<\/p>\n

Hence, for example, the recent announcement by Google that it will demonetise media that \u201ccontradicts the scientific consensus on climate change\u201d. (Spoiler: there is no such thing as \u201cconsensus\u201d in science. There is definitely no \u201cconsensus\u201d on climate change, neither on the causes nor the solutions. If there were a consensus Google would not need to indulge in censoring dissident voices because everyone would agree on the subject already).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BMJ Urges Doctors to Cut Back on Treatment Because Climate Change Doctors should think less about the health of their patients and more about the health of the planet, an editorial in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) has urged. The editorial, published as part of a\u00a0special edition\u00a0dedicated to the forthcoming COP26 climate summit … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-health-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73111,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73110\/revisions\/73111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}