One step ahead for environment and health: doctors take preventative action

Volume 10 Number 11 November 10 - December 7 2014

 

Melbourne medical students have put on their running shoes to promote health awareness. By Liz Banks-Anderson

Doctors and medical students are letting their feet do the talking when it comes to raising awareness about of environmental impacts on health. 

Melbourne medical students and their fellow members of the Doctors for Environment Australia have responded to a call to action to raise awareness of the task. 

On 12 October, more than 70 doctors, medical students and their friends and family completed the Melbourne Marathon, to highlight the need to protect the environment for a sustainable climate and also to ensure personal health and wellbeing.

Twenty-seven-year-old medical student Laura Beaton was motivated to run the annual Melbourne Marathon to spread the Doctors for the Environment Australia’s message that environmental issues impact on health and that doctors have a unique capacity to advocate in this space. 

“The World Health Organization, the Lancet, everyone agrees environmental damages and an unstable climate affects public health,” she says.

The effects of climate change will bring Australia and the developing world an increased burden of heat stroke, injury from fire and storm, infectious diseases and social disruption and mental illness as well as famine and water shortage. 

The World Health Organization estimates that one quarter of global disease and one third of that in children is due to modifiable environmental factors.

The most common illness in an urban environment is asthma in adults and children and chronic lung disease, which can be exacerbated by poor air quality caused by pollution from energy production such as fossil fuels.

Ms Beaton felt compelled to contribute to measures being taken to protect the environment and “step it up to the next level,” joining the Doctors for Environmental Australia (DEA) to participate in events like the Melbourne Marathon. 

DEA is a voluntary organisation of medical doctors in all states and territories which works to address local, national and global diseases caused by damage to the earth’s environment. 

Ms Beaton says joining DEA felt like a perfect fit to allow her to actively pursue more preventative approaches to medicine and raise awareness of the environmental impacts on health. 

“I found a natural home (in DEA),” she says. “Medicine can be quite reactive and you’re often acting in response to a problem. While that’s really good, it’s sometimes a little bit unsatisfying. I would like to be part of stopping people from having these problems,” she says. 

The major determinants of health Ms Beaton cites as being affected by the environment include issues such as food security, clean water, extreme weather events including fires, floods and drought and air pollution. 

The group of doctors chose the Melbourne Marathon because it was a good way to positively promote health, spread the message of the DEA and bond with other team members.

The team adopted a busy training schedule, meeting friends, family and team members to train together, adding another component to an already busy schedule. 

“There’s an old adage, if you want something done give it to a busy person. You just do it,” Ms Beaton says. 

One of the beliefs of the group who participated in the marathon is that part of recognising the environmental impact on health is actively taking measures that address its causes and work toward prevention of disease.

While acknowledging that preventative medicine comes with its own challenges, Ms Beaton believes doctors can rise to the challenge of advocating in the public sphere to raise awareness of environmental impacts on health. 

“Doctors have a proud history of advocating for issues of public health in the political sphere, such as calling for interventions regarding tobacco control. This is the next field where doctors are rallying to try to get people to pay attention to the health impacts of the environment,” she says. 

“We’re just lining our pockets if we say we will treat all of these diseases but we won’t prevent them. Prevention is both effective economically and it’s the humane approach, to try to minimise human suffering in the world,” Ms Beaton says. 

A key outcome Ms Beaton would like to see from this experience is an increase in people’s awareness of such issues, and an acknowledgement that, as she says, “human health is directly impacted by our physical environment, that we can do something about it, and we should.”

 

www.dea.org.au/