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The U.S. health care industry could learn a lot from India's doctors
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Popular Science
Posted: December 17th, 2017
https://www.popsci.com/us-health-care-industry-generates-ton...
The medical industry produces plenty of waste ... in addition to using loads of energy. The health care sector accounts for 10 percent of carbon pollution in the United States. Unfortunately, the way we practice medicine today has a negative impact on our environment and, in turn, human health, [said NYU Langone Health professor Cassandra Thiel]. She and her colleagues decided to examine the problem of health industry emissions to see if they could find greener approaches. They studied cataract surgeries performed in a health care center in India, the Avravind Eye Care System, which is seen as a model for its low cost and excellent results. Because the United States and other developed nations rely largely on single-use materials in surgery, we wanted to examine whether a different approach, where surgical supplies are mostly reused, could make a bigger impact on reducing emissions, she said. Their paper appears in the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery. India currently performs over seven million cataract surgeries a year, Thiel said. If all were done with the U.K.s process, they would emit nearly one million metric tons of greenhouse gases. If all were conducted with Aravinds process, they would emit about 40,000 metric tons of greenhouse gasses. This difference is equivalent to removing over 230,000 passenger vehicles from the road..
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