By Gianna Melillo
When people hear the term "environmental" or "climate health," the concept can feel very distant, according to Elizabeth A. Cerceo, MD, FACP. But environmental exposures have direct effects on patients and can affect every organ system and aspect of practice, she said.
In a Thursday session, Dr. Cerceo, a hospitalist and associate program director of the internal medicine residency at Cooper University Health Care in Camden, N.J., and co-panelist Caren Solomon, MD, MPH, deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, will discuss how environmental problems like air pollution and toxic substances harm patients and what physicians can do about them. Ryan Crowley, Senior Associate for Health Policy at ACP, will moderate.
Because the topic is so wide, physicians may feel there’s little they can do to combat these risks to their patients. Dr. Cerceo hopes to change this mindset and empower clinicians to achieve change. “There actually are ways that you can counsel your patients, ways that they can mitigate their risk, and ideally, ways that you can even impact policy [at] your regional and even national level,” she explained.
The session will give an overview of climate health and include specific cases so physicians can see how the environment affects patients on a day-to-day basis, Dr. Cerceo said. “What we're hoping to cover in this session are some topics that we feel might be very accessible and very relevant to a large number of people. These would be effects of air pollution on the heart, on the respiratory system, on even things like diabetes.” Dr. Cerceo notes that climate health matters for clinicians and their patients “no matter where we’re practicing.”
The field of climate health is also rapidly evolving. “It's certainly a very exciting time and hopefully very energizing for many of us,” Dr. Cerceo said, and although it may be difficult to keep up with new advances, she hopes to encourage clinicians to be open to learning about new research and incorporating it into their practices. ■