Painting: “Snow-Covered Valley—Northern Utah,” by Alanna S. Graboyes. asgraboyesart.com
This is not an article on climate change. Nothing written below disparages the notion that climatic conditions have changed over the past century, nor the idea of anthropogenic causality, nor the import of policy actions. Those are questions for other researchers in other forums.
Here, we address only one question: Should your doctor spend time working on solving climate change? Recently, the American Medical Association decided that the answer is “yes.” Specifically, the AMA “declar[ed] climate change a public health crisis” and, among other things, announced that the organization will develop “strategies to decarbonize physician practices and the health sector.”
Climate change is a worthy topic for debate and policy action, but it’s unlikely that your doctor, or even the American medical profession as a whole, will have much impact on the environment. More time spent on social activism means less time available to care for American patients. In its October 2021 Advancing Health Equity, the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) implored doctors to shift “from the traditional biomedical focus on the individual and their behavior to a health equity focus on the well-being of communities, as shaped by social and structural drivers.”
In 2022, getting an appointment for medical treatment can take days, weeks, or months. When you’re finally face-to-face with the doctor, he or she is likely hurried and harried—squeezing too many appointments into too little time. Facing burnout, an increasing number of doctors abandon traditional practices for concierge medicine—leaving a sizable majority of their former patients to search for new providers in a market where—according to the AMA itself—increased demand for care will outstrip the supply of new doctors for decades. (I have no objection to concierge medicine, but the mathematics is real.) The reality of the AMA’s desire is, “I’m sorry, but the doctor won’t be able to see your child. She is away attending a seminar on climate change.”
In addition to climate change, the AMA and AAMC have devoted considerable verbiage to the worthy goal of combating disparities among health outcomes of different racial categories (“structural racism”). In such an environment, it is worth asking: When doctors spend less time on patient care and more time fighting climate change, who do you think will have a harder time getting medical care: Well-to-do white suburban households, or lower-income African-American inner-city households?
And, despite the AMA’s recent hullabaloo, the idea that “climate change [is] a public health crisis” is nothing new. Last year, I wrote that the following topics have been declared matters of public health: “climate change, property law, racism, wages, voting laws, transportation, terrorism, crime, policing, juvenile justice, higher education, employment, incarceration, financial lending, identity theft, bullying, gentrification, human trafficking, online poker and who knows what else.”
Climate scientists have their place in society, as do physicians. Their roles, however, are not the same.