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The Green Staff Of Asclepius: Envisioning Sustainable Medicine, Jason Lee Fishel

Doctoral Dissertations

To make society sustainable our institutions must also become sustainable. As an institution, health care contributes to environmental degradation. While unsurprising, contributions to environmental degradation increase risk factors for disease and illness, effectively frustrating the goals of medicine. To find ways to make health care sustainable I begin by reviewing the literature on sustainability from within environmental ethics and two previous attempts at envisioning sustainable health care in order to learn what to include in a vision of sustainable health care. Then I examine problems specific to making medicine sustainable by investigating how sustainability might affect the principles of medicine. …