B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from 'climate change'

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Merritt remembers hitting a tipping point, the extreme heat an opening salvo in another summer of crisis. He started contacting other doctors and nurses, in Prince George, Kamloops, Vancouver and Victoria.

The response was immediate. Roughly 40 doctors and nurses at the small hospital — all busy trying to manage a pandemic and their regular professional lives — came together under the banner Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health.

“I was worried about the summer that was coming,” says Merritt of the rising number of health-care workers desperate to talk about how climate change is affecting their patients’ health.

“I was really quite amazed at how many people have decided to jump in.”

Just as doctors and nurses started to make sense of the record heat, it cleared — only to be replaced by a blanket of wildfire smoke.

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When a patient came in struggling to breathe, Merritt knew the smoke — that hadn’t lifted from the region for days on end — had made a case of asthma worse.

For the first time in his 10 years as a physician, the ER doctor picked up his patient’s chart and penned in the words “climate change.”

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