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Amy Orr was watching TV one night some time ago when she felt a stabbing pain in her upper abdomen. Still hurting a few days later, she went to the emergency room, where doctors suspected gallstones. But tests were inconclusive, so they gave her pain meds and sent her home. The pain vanished that night, but it showed up again and again for months. She wound up at the ER dozens of times, and nobody could figure out why. As time went on, she lost more than 70 pounds and so much muscle she could barely walk.
“I was crying all the time because it was debilitating in every way: physically, mentally and emotionally,” recalls Amy, a 36-year-old editor in Waterloo, Canada. “I was so afraid it would never go away, that I would just have this crushing pain for the rest of my life. And it was especially upsetting to feel like my doctors didn’t care.” After a year of torment, another set of physicians finally diagnosed the infected gallbladder others had miss
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We often talk about the ways climate change affects the Earth (think: polar bears teetering on shrinking ice caps) but forget to consider its impact on our own health. Recently, an urgent report from several federal agencies emphasized this connection, including both straightforward consequences (such as that warmer oceans mean more frequent and intense hurricanes) and indirect hazards like how extreme weather events knock out medical services, making it harder to treat people.
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Our health risks are changing because of climate shifts,” says John Balbus, M.D., M.P.H., a senior adviser for public health at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.