The editorial, issued as part of a special edition devoted to the anticipated COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, says that medical treatment contributes greatly to "greenhouse gas emissions" and that this carbon footprint can be reduced if only "health professionals" can learn to reduce "overdiagnosis" and "overtreatment."
Healthcare contributes 4-5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the NHS, 62 percent of these emissions are from its supply chains and 24 percent from care delivery. Health professionals can be institutional leaders who drive decarbonization in hospitals by decreasing overdiagnosis and overtreatment, reducing waste, streamlining services, and better managing suppliers and procurement. All of these applications will bring us closer to making healthcare more sustainable.
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A separate piece argues that one of the more significant problems is all those pesky suspected cancer patients who tirelessly insist on getting as early a diagnosis as possible. Instead, they need to learn to wait, argues one Rammya Mathew:
"The pressure to diagnose cancers earlier and earlier is another significant contributor to modern medicine's carbon footprint. Over successive years, we've been told to lower our threshold for suspecting cancer continually, and we're encouraged to investigate sooner and more extensively. In primary care, most patients with mildly elevated or even high average platelet count now experience a barrage of investigations in case thrombocytosis is an early sign of underlying cancer. What does the yield of these tests have to be to make this an acceptable approach? And shouldn't we be considering the environmental influence of putting so many patients on a conveyor belt of investigations as part of cost-benefit calculations?"
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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…
Old fashioned types who think doctors should be focusing on healthcare rather than engaging in environmental activism may be puzzled by this. Yet they shouldn't be. The Climate Industrial Complex — and the sinister billionaire backers behind it, like the World Economic Forum — has run a hugely triumphant gaslighting operation in which schools, universities, the entertainment industry, big business, and the mainstream media now broadcast nothing but environmental scare stories. Any stories giving evidence that the global warming scare has been massively overblown are ruthlessly suppressed.
Therefore, for instance, the recent announcement by Google that it will demonetize media that "contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change."
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