Climate Warriors are Colonising Medicine
BY BEN PILE 19 JULY 2024 1:20 PM
This week, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) published a ‘Green Physician Toolkit‘. The toolkit from perhaps the world’s oldest professional organisation, founded by royal charter in the early 16th century, has caused an eruption of incredulous comment. Controversy has been created by the fact that, as well as the planet-saving advice such as “Generate less waste” and “Limit the environmental impact of travel”, the toolkit suggested doctors “Reduce unnecessary prescribing” and “Limit diagnostic activities”. Journalists have been asking whether the RCP is asking doctors to put green ideology before care. But worse, the toolkit is evidence of a deadly virus spreading throughout professional institutions. This vicious pathogen erodes professional standards and ethics and dissolves institutions’ founding principles.
The idea of a climate “toolkit” for doctors may sound familiar. That’s because it’s not a new idea. Earlier this year the WHO published precisely the same thing – a “toolkit” that the WHO claimed is “designed to equip health and care workers with the knowledge and confidence to effectively communicate about climate change and health”. But the toolkit seemed more designed for GCSE students than for people with advanced degrees in medicine. Trite, condescending, shallow in detail and containing conjecture in place of fact, the WHO’s missive was an injunction – holy green orders – to proselytise. And now it seems that the RCP has done the WHO’s bidding.
There is not much more to say about the RCP’s reproduction of the WHO’s toolkit itself that has not already been said. Suffice it to say that if doctors are running too many diagnostic tests, or prescribing drugs unnecessarily, then these are problems in their own right, and the doctor’s first and only duty is towards the patient’s health, not the planet’s “health”, which should be of no concern to doctors and nurses, nor their managers. The tension between these two putative beneficiaries of clinicians’ work speaks to the antagonism posited by environmentalism between “Nature” and humanity. On the green view, industrial and economic development, which have indubitably raised living standards, are unsustainable at current rates. The greater good can only be served by limiting or reversing that development. And that has to have consequences for human welfare. In other words, the WHO’s and RCP’s toolkits really are a green utilitarian ‘greater good’ injunction to begin rationing medicine for Gaia’s benefit. That tension is intractable.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/07/19/climate-warriors-are-colonising-medicine/
