If we're going back to the days of candles and firewood, why not return to the medical treatments of that era?

Having abolished the MCAT requirement and grades, imposing racial quotas, and transforming the curriculum to one dedicated to learning about and eradicating white racism, Harvard Medical School adds another distraction: Global Warming.

Harvard Medical School is including climate change in its medical school curriculum. And not just some minor nod to the issue; rather it is woven into the curriculum all 4 years.

Because of course it is. Why not? It’s not like medicine has anything to do with fundamental biological realities, the proper functioning of body parts, or things that used to be crucial to Western medicine. We are all into respecting Indigenous spirituality, unnatural identities, and shaky theories.

I’m mildly surprised nobody has tried to hire Gwyneth Paltrow to teach about the healing power of shoving stones into one’s private parts. Maybe soon.

The impetus for including climate change, and yes, climate activism into the medical training came from an unsurprising source: a whiny white wealthy woman who pressured the school to take up the challenge of healing the planet.

Raised by two psychologists, Madeleine Kline had wanted to become a doctor since she was little. And when she learned in high school how human activity was fueling climate change, she concluded “it felt fundamentally like a health problem.”

So it seemed the most natural thing for her to go into medicine. And once at Harvard Medical School, she combined her two interests to help produce a novel undertaking at the 350-year-old institution: embed teaching about the effects of climate change into all four years of the medical degree curriculum.

“I realized that the world then,” she said of her youth, “was not the world that I was going to inhabit as an adult or raise my children in. And, if I wanted to help take care of people, I needed to understand the challenges my patients were going to face.”

Now in her third year, Kline was among a small group of students and faculty who helped convince school leaders to adopt the new curriculum, which was approved earlier in January. It will include instruction on the effects of climate change on human health, the role health care systems play in contributing to climate change, and how physicians can work to be part of the solution.Harvard Medical School is including climate change in its medical school curriculum. And not just some minor nod to the issue; rather it is woven into the curriculum all 4 years.

I already prefer to be treated by white or Asian male doctors because I know that they’ve had to have demonstrated exceptional competence to get into med school, but now I have to worry about where they earned their degree; a foreign school might be safest.