Harvard Medical School’s Climate Change Curriculum Examines How it Impacts ‘Health and Health Inequality’
“Every student who comes through the Medical School will leave with an understanding of what climate change is and what it means for their patients”
What does climate change have to do with medicine? Does it even matter? The left is just imposing their politics on everything.
The College Fix reports:
Harvard Medical School adds climate change to its curriculum
Harvard Medical School (HMS) soon will be adding climate change to its curriculum, a decision made by its Educational Policy and Curriculum Committee last month.
According to The Crimson, the addition will “examine the impact of climate change on health and health inequality, applications of these impacts to clinical care, and the role of physicians and health institutions in arriving at climate solutions.”
HMS Climate and Health Curriculum Theme Director Gaurab Basu (pictured) and members of the group Students for Environmental Awareness in Medicine led the curriculum change effort.
According to his faculty page, Basu is a trained community organizer and “has been recognized nationally for his work in climate change and health equity.” He’s won the HMS Equity, Social Justice and Advocacy faculty award and has served on the HMS’s Task Force to Address Racism.
The Harvard School of Public Health’s Caleb Dresser said students and faculty “have been pushing” to add a climate change component into the HMS studies for some time.
“Many graduates of Harvard Medical School go on to leadership positions in medicine and beyond,” Dresser said. “It’s going to be increasingly important for people in leadership roles in healthcare and other industries to integrate climate change and climate-related hazards into their strategic decision making as they lead organizations.”
[Student Benjamin] Grobman said changes in the Medical School’s curriculum are just one step toward addressing the impacts of climate change on health care.
“It has to go beyond that, and I think that’s something that hopefully we can start to do in the future,” he said. “But I think curriculum is essential because it really lays the groundwork for people to be thinking about these issues.”
HMS student Madeleine C. Kline said though medical education remains outside of her core passions, the potential for enhanced patient care has motivated her to push to modify the curriculum.
“Every student who comes through the Medical School will leave with an understanding of what climate change is and what it means for their patients,” she said. “I think it is going to mean a lot for their patients.”
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
The plan is contrary to the scientific facts.
1. A warmer climate will be very positive for all life on earth. Numerous published, peer-reviewed studies have shown that more people die from cool or cold weather than from warm or hot weather. See:
A. Gasparrini, et al., “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, The Lancet (2015) http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962114-0.pdf
J. Liu, et al., “Mortality burden attributable to high and low ambient temperatures in China and its provinces: Results from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019”, The Lancet Regional Health Western Pacific (2022), 24, 100493. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(22)00108-0/fulltext
J.E. Brody, “Beware: Winter is Coming”, New York Times, 12/19/2016 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/well/beware-winter-is-coming.html
2. More CO2 in the air greatly improves agriculture, meaning many fewer people are starving. Thousands of published studies are referenced and linked here:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php
The arid areas (deserts) have shrunk significantly due to the increased CO2, because plants use less water with more CO2 in the air:
Z. Zhu, et al., “Greening of the Earth and its drivers”, Nature Climate Change (online 25 April 2016): DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3004. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n8/full/nclimate3004.html See: https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/26/rise-in-co2-has-greened-planet-earth/ and http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36130346 for further analysis.
Will these two key points be in the classes?
When are people going to wake up and realize that trying to cool the planet is RAAACIST, since persons of color have less resources to overcome the opposite of all the good things mentioned.
Explain to me again how Harvard medical students need a Trained Community Agitator to help their disempowered selves demand what they’ve been shorted by the man?
Harvard: moving ever faster down the road from university to punchline.
I didn’t know before that there’s lots of spare time in med school to waste on stuff that is irrelevant to learning to be a competent doctor. Will they have residencies in climate change and eventually become board-certified in climate change?
If they’re confident their stuff is right, why don’t they try it first on students of meteorology? Because they’d get laughed out of the room, probably.
It is remarkable that HMS students have become so much brighter and more capable of recall than their predecessors that they can take off the time from trying to grasp the immense amount of information that is necessary in order to become a capable physician to complete a unit that has (at best) a tangential relationship to diagnosing and treating patients. Will HMS next offer a unit in IPM (Indigenous Peoples’ Medicine) so that newly-minted MDs can understand the contributions to health made by witch doctors? Surely a course in CMT (Critical Medical Theory) could inculcate in them the proper self-loathing and hatred of racist-infested medical research to make them better able to participate in the radical deconstruction of species-ist medical practice for a better tomorrow! (It could be taught in the months-long slot now wasted in the study of Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology and other obsolete disciplines.
Any doctor who starts quoting global warming dogma to me had better be treating me for gastroenterological problems.