Your medical history may one day include ‘climate change’

That didn’t happen in this case. But Merritt said if he were to do it all over again, he might have done things differently. As things unfolded, he didn’t tell the patient that he wrote “climate change” on her chart. In fact, they didn’t discuss climate change at all. “If I had written it in the chart knowing that it was something I was trying to tell a story about, I don’t know. I might have talked more to the patient and got their consent,” he said. “Of course, when I did, I didn’t know it was going to be any kind of story.” To this day, Merritt still believes the patient didn’t know she was the one in the story.

Go beyond the details About Merritt and his patients, this story raises big questions about how medicine can and should address systemic effects on health.

Merritt wrote down “climate change” in frustration and wanted to record what he was seeing in real time. Other doctors have taken a different approach. Nyasha Spears, a physician at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, has taken almost the opposite tack to Merritt — instead of quietly writing broader views on the chart, she is constantly talking to her patients about climate change and environment. “As a family doctor, my job is to change habits. That’s what I do,” she said. “So my thinking on climate change is, can I always emphasize in my conversations with patients that habit change is good for them on an individual level, but it’s also good for the environment?“

In the case of Merritt’s patients, the conversation may have done little. There was nothing she could do about her condition or change her habits to avoid the heat. Like many in her community, she probably couldn’t afford to have an air conditioner on her trailer, and there was little else she could do. In a situation like this, Ray said it may not be necessary to talk about climate change. “They feel helpless because there’s nothing they can do,” she said. “They’re actually living, it’s just that life makes them sick.”

This reality can be bleak for both doctors and patients. To address these links between health and structural conditions such as climate change and racism, physicians need to ask not only what they can do for each patient, but also what changes they can make in medicine to account for and account for these connect. Today, there is no diagnostic code for climate change, no way to link these cases or track them in any way, but maybe there should be.

“There are all kinds of ICD-10 codes that are completely hollow,” Spears said. “If you want to entertain yourself, you just have to start looking at the ICD 10 codes.’fall from the spaceship‘Is an. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to develop ICD-10 codes for climate change diseases. “Being able to track these additional, systemic determinants of health could make it easier to demonstrate these links and do something about them.