Doctor Clinically Diagnoses Patient with 'Climate Change' Because Her Asthma Got Worse During Heat Wave
It’s increasingly difficult to trust the mainstream medical establishment when there’s so much quackery coming out of it lately.
The discipline that brought humanity miracles like antibiotics and heart transplants is now succumbing to the siren song of wokeism, replacing mothers with pregnant people, mutilating children instead of treating their delusions, and now conferring the virtue-signaling diagnosis of “climate change.”
Though it sounds like satire, it’s how Dr. Kyle Merritt, who heads the emergency department at a Canadian hospital, charted a patient’s asthma troubles during a June heat wave in British Columbia, the Times Colonist reported.
Merritt recounted how the patient in her 70s came into Kootenay Lake Hospital in Nelson, B.C., with trouble breathing and how it led to his decision to describe her malady with the politically charged term.
“She has diabetes. She has some heart failure. … She lives in a trailer, no air conditioning,” Merritt said to Glacier Media, the news outlet’s parent company, of the unnamed patient.
“All of her health problems have all been worsened. And she’s really struggling to stay hydrated,” he added.
Rather than chalking it up to the other preexisting conditions — including asthma — exacerbated by the heat, Merritt settled for the only one that could virtue signal: “climate change.”
“If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” he said.
“It’s me trying to just … process what I’m seeing,” the doctor claimed.
“We’re in the emergency department, we look after everybody, from the most privileged to the most vulnerable, from cradle to grave, we see everybody,” Merritt explained.
“And it’s hard to see people, especially the most vulnerable people in our society, being affected. It’s frustrating,” Merritt said.
The doctor parlayed this diagnosis into further activism, convincing 40 of his colleagues to band together to form Doctors + Nurses for Planetary Health to create this amalgam of medicine and political activism.
“I was worried about the summer that was coming,” Merritt said. “I was really quite amazed at how many people have decided to jump in.”
The organization tweeted that it had its “first successful Climate Rally” in conjunction with Doctors for Planetary Health -West Coast, though the photos showed a handful of people gathered in the cold with a few signs.
Had our first successful Climate Rally thanks to @WCDrs4PH and #codered #cop26 pic.twitter.com/H8q5QbsgZ2
— Doctors & Nurses for Planetary Health – KB (@KBDrsNurses4PH) November 4, 2021
Though it seems like Merritt’s heart was in the right place, this misguided compassion that led to changing accepted medical diagnoses does not reflect the precision and scientific rigor normally expected of doctors.
While it’s true that British Columbia experienced record heat last summer and subsequent wildfires, it’s quite a stretch to blame a changing climate for an elderly woman’s run-of-the-mill health concerns.
But this thinking dovetails neatly with the way leftists have hijacked science and medicine to advance their radical agenda.
Besides the move leftward in gender ideology, COVID-19 mitigation measures supposedly about “following the science” were arbitrary or even contradictory — but they were embraced as unimpeachable facts because they allowed leftist regimes to amass even more power.
Now that the pandemic panic is burning out, the next great hysteria will be climate change, though Americans are mostly ambivalent about the issue as more immediate concerns like inflation and supply chain woes crowd out lesser worries.
Whether the climate is changing — and whether it is caused by man — are questions not answered definitively. They certainly are nowhere near the settled science the left claims.
Moreover, the problems Merritt and his colleagues saw their patients experiencing could easily be mitigated using technology like air conditioning that’s vilified for its energy consumption, despite its life-saving role during excessive heat events.
Instead, climate change zealots rail against the use of fossil fuels that power the things that make life better, easier and even safer for humans.
In the end, this doctor may have scored some points with the woke left in his novel diagnosis, but he’s damaged the credibility of his profession — and that’s more dangerous to public health than a hot summer.
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