My stethoscope is more than half my age and every year it gets proportionally closer to my age. It doesn’t have an expiration date and works just fine. In fact, not everything in medicine has a short expiration date or is consumable. Despite that, the traditional economy of healthcare is largely disposable. Healthcare materials are taken […]
Category: Global warming
In the Western world, the festive season is in full swing and our focus remains on food and drink – most of which is not produced locally. Despite our best intentions, our plates around this time of year are crammed with highly refined cheap foods distributed by a small number of producers. Ten food processors […]
Ecological doctors, like environmentalists generally, are conflicted about population growth. On one hand, in a crowded world, creating genuinely sustainable societies can be supported by medical practices that support limitations on population growth, such as first-class sex education, adequate contraception and access to termination of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. Conversely, clinicians with fundamental religious beliefs […]
Whatever the political divides, citizens worldwide agree that responsible government should provide adequate healthcare for the whole population. Unfortunately, both patients and clinicians often get too subsumed in the weight of immediate crises to agitate beyond their own current concerns. Healthy children can help inject our anemic healthcare systems with new blood. We need to […]
Today’s medical practitioners are expected to perform more than clinical roles. They are expected to act as resource managers, clinical standards arbitrators, educators, researchers, and patient advocates. If all these weren’t enough, now tack on the additional role of green advocate. Little is known about the processing of less toxic waste once it leaves health […]
What goes in must come out – in some form or another. Our bodies are relatively efficient processing systems, so when we have extracted what we require from pharmaceutical agents, the rest is excreted in urine and faeces and finally makes its way to our wastewater. Seventy-two percent of these pharmaceuticals end up in our […]
About one third of the world’s population experiences at least 20 days per year of extreme heat conditions that can be considered deadly. Block quote: In heatwaves we need to change the way we think about our environment. The most vulnerable groups are children, older adults and individuals with type 2 diabetes especially those with associated co-morbidities […]
The Thinker 