Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Clinicians and organizations in the health sector have healing missions, and physicians, specifically, take oaths to "do no harm."Yet, paradoxically, health care operations contribute to pollution and exacerbate environmental disease burden.This article offers a view of how health sector actions exacerbate climate warming and iatrogenically harm global public health and argues that clinicians and organizations have ethical responsibilities to respond.The American Medical Association designates this journal-based CME activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ available through the AMA Ed Hub TM .Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.Lessons From the Syringe Tide Medical waste management ethics came into focus in the late 1980s, when HIVcontaminated syringes, needles, and other medical trash washed up on East Coast beaches. 1 Known as the Syringe Tide, 1 this environmental disaster led to awareness of improper disposal of sharps and infectious waste as exacerbating pollution and increasing pathogen exposure and needlestick injuries and prompted passage of the Medical Waste Tracking Act of 1988. 2 A movement to properly segregate and dispose of medical waste to protect human and planetary health had begun.As this example illustrates, the health sector's waste management practices can have health impacts.Despite the age-old, ethical code of medicine to "do no harm," the health sector, through its direct and indirect emissions and waste management practices, contributes to many conditions that clinicians that aim to treat.Professionals and organizations have responsibilities to reconcile such ethical inconsistency and to better align their commitment to nonmaleficence with the consequences of their actions.In what follows, we discuss how health sector actions exacerbate climate warming and iatrogenically harm global public health and argue that clinicians and health organizations have ethical responsibilities to respond to the health sector's contribution to the climate crisis.
Source: The AMA Journal of Ethic
Authors: Amy Collins, Shanda Demorest
Institution: Health Care Without Harm
Language: English
Subfield: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4304117276