When I started practicing as an internal medicine physician years ago, I had many thoughts about what my future in patient care might hold. I can confidently say that flying to Egypt for the international climate conference COP27 was not one of them! And yet, mid-career, I found myself in Sharm El-Sheikh, encountering images and stories of global health concerns I had never learned about in medical school. I was joined by other clinicians, as part of a physician climate and health fellowship, there to underscore the health harms of fossil-fuel-driven climate change. A goal of the COP is to coordinate global climate action, but images of polar bears stranded on melting ice caps hadn’t done enough to move the international community to act. We knew our patients’ real-life stories would be more compelling: a child’s asthma triggered by wildfire smoke, a senior sweltering in a high rise without A/C, a teen struggling with climate anxiety. The best people to tell these stories were, of course, our patients with lived experience, but we clinicians could empower these same patients by amplifying their narratives, and offering clinical insight in order to influence upstream change.
At COP27, I attended several presentations and discussions highlighting the intersection of health and climate change. Listening to the UNFCCC and Health Care Without Harm Health Futures Lab, I was riveted by Dr. Arvind Kumar’s presentation. This Chest surgeon from India displayed a slide showing three sets of lungs in a row. The healthy lungs furthest to the left served as a “control.” The other two sets belonged to Delhi residents and looked diseased–the underlying pink tissue speckled with black. The middle set belonged to a non-smoking man in his mid-40’s while the lungs on the far right, though marginally less damaged, were the most unsettling. They belonged to a 14-year-old boy, a child close in age to my own sons, whose lungs looked like a smoker’s despite never having smoked. Dr. Kumar went on to say that the air quality in Delhi, one of the world’s most polluted cities, was so poor that living there led to lung damage equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. He then relayed that fossil fuel pollution damages many tissues in the body (including the heart and brain) and it begins in utero. My reaction was visceral. I had witnessed the immense potential of clinician storytelling to engage, motivate and lead change.