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Dermatologist shares tips to tackle climate change
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Climate change is a solvable problem, and physicians have a critical role to play in depoliticizing the issue and encouraging solutions, Sarah J. Coates, MD, from the department of dermatology, University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote in a recent viewpoint in JAMA Dermatology.
Healio Dermatology spoke with Coates about her clinical focus at the intersection of climate change, public health and dermatology.
Coates attended medical school at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, where she became interested in global health as a career path.
During medical school, she lived in Tanzania twice and worked on a teledermatology project that enabled remote connection of dermatology specialists to primary care doctors.
She is currently in her final year as a dermatology resident at the University of California, San Francisco. After completing residency, Coates will begin a Fogarty Global Health Fellowship in Kampala, Uganda.
“I see studying the effects of climate change on human health as being at the nexus of all of these interests,” Coates said.
Question: What three steps can dermatologists take to be more environmentally minded?
Answer: First, join Mygreendoctor.org. It is a free website that allows physicians to take easy steps to “green” their practices. Secondly, consider traveling less and teleconferencing more for short professional meetings and/or consider purchasing carbon offsets for travel related to professional meetings. And lastly, let the American Academy of Dermatology know that you care about climate change and its impact on human health by voting for climate change as a “hot topic” before the annual AAD meeting.
Q: Did anything surprise you about climate change or in the U.N. report in the process of writing this action plan for JAMA Dermatology?
A: I have been consistently surprised by the speed at which climate change has moved. I live in California and have seen us break wildfire records twice in the last 2 years and witnessed what happens to communities that are upended by extreme weather events. You would think that these experiences would start to make the effects of climate change less “surprising.” That said, I was truly shocked by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in October 2018, which told us that we have 12 years to act before we head down a largely irreversible path to 2°C+ global warming. This is what spurred our action in writing this report.
Q: Will you be publishing more about climate change and how practitioners can have an impact?
A: Yes. I have published papers in the past about climate change and will continue to do so in the future. In the past, I have published about the relationship of temperature and humidity to a largely childhood skin condition called hand, foot and mouth disease, as well as the relationship between coccidioidomycosis (Valley fever) infections to climate change. I am a new member of the International Society of Dermatology Climate Change Committee, and we publish regularly as a group. Practitioners can have an impact in the three ways listed above and by making themselves more aware of this issue and all the aspects of human health that climate change affects.
Disclosure: Coates reports no relevant financial disclosures.