This repo serves as way to house recent publications conveniently. Below are the titles of the publications followed by a brief abstract and link to article. All pieces were either peer-reviewed or invited.
When considering the health and flourishing of humans and human communities, we cannot ignore that we are constitutively bound to the health of ecosystems of which we are a part. As such, global climate change is a central concern for health care and bioethics. Addressing the complex and interrelated realities bound up with global climate change requires a multifaceted and integrated approach from diverse academic and professional disciplines and perspectives. This essay offers a brief conceptual framing of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s (VUMC) Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society’s Rooted Community Health (RCH) programmatic initiative, with particular focus on how medical ethics provides necessary insight into the intersection of climate change and health and how RCH has turned these insights into actionable practices of care in the VUMC and Middle Tennessee Communities.
This article is born out of a deep concern for our current ecological crisis and serves as a beginning foundational work for how the Christian tradition can address global climate change. Our current way of being gives precedence to the autonomous individual, whose freedom is characterized by disregard for other creatures. John Zizioulas’ communal ontology demonstrates that as the world was created out of God’s loving will, it is comprised of relationship. Living into individuation and division is a refusal of this communion with other creatures and God, but the Eucharist serves as the ritual that brings Christians into communion through the remembrance of Christ. Ian McFarland’s work on the theology of creation provides the helpful nuance that creaturely movement in communion must include the full diversity of creatures. I then turn to Bruce Morrill’s work to demonstrate that the Eucharistic practice must have bearing beyond the walls of the church. It leads practitioners to live into eschatological hope and kenotic service to the world. John Seligman’s ritual theory demonstrates that ritual practice can accomplish these goals because it creates a subjunctive ‘as-if’ world in the face of the world that is perceived as chaotic. Through the continuous practice of the ritual, participants are then formed to live into this subjunctive ‘as-if’ world without ritual precedence. In this way, the Eucharistic practice can prepare practitioners to live into the kenotic service to a world broken by individuation that has led to global climate change and creaturely destruction
A Systematic Review of Peer-Reviewed Literature Authored by Medical Professionals Regarding US Biomedicine's Role in Responding to Climate Change
Extant literature illustrates a substantive impact on human health because of climate change. Despite this, discussions of the ethical and policymaking role of US health care's response to this problem are underdeveloped within peer-reviewed literature indexed in core medical databases. We conducted a systematic literature review in August 2017 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center of the following medical, business and policy databases to examine the state of inquiry on this topic: PubMed, CINAHL, PsychINFO, JAMA Network, Health Affairs, Business Source Complete, Greylit.org, LexisNexis Academic, Proquest Dissertations and Theses Global. An initial sample of n=4434 rendered n=75 articles precisely addressing this question following a two-tiered systematic examination of content. US medical professionals were most concerned by the health impacts of air pollution and respiratory complications, extreme weather events, and rising infectious/vector-borne diseases. They were least concerned by rising rates of migration and stresses to sanitation systems. Medical professionals took a broadly proactive stance to the issue, highlighting the need to implement education and advocacy strategies. Politics was the least pertinent motivation for climate change-related recommendations. Furthermore, partnerships between health care and public agencies were identified as holding the greatest potential for meaningful change. Mitigation approaches were slightly more common than adaptation approaches. We conclude that, while the enthusiasm of the medical community is commendable, efforts to address climate change in US health care are overly fractured, and lack the necessary expertise for efficaciousness.
This short article serves as a short editorial on the issues related to GMO technology and allergies. It provides brief commentary on the primary research article of this issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and discusses the ways that care providers must navigate issues related to popularly held beliefs and questions or concerns for which we lack evidence.