Physicians have an obligation to consider a patient’s quality of life when making treatment decisions and should consider giving patients the options of withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment if that treatment will not restore the kind of life the patient finds meaningful.
A digital record of place history and environmental context can provide a piece of clinically relevant information to help physicians understand what toxins patients may have been exposed to.
Medicine, a high-energy consumer and generator of much waste—some of it toxic—must scale back the health care enterprise in the interest of preserving a livable environment.