Swap your inhaler, skip the laughing gas: How patients can help curb health-care emissions

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If you're struggling to breathe or heading into surgery, concerns about climate change are likely not top-of-mind compared to worries about managing your own health.

But rather ironically, the health-care sector contributes to climate change by giving off a sizeable chunk of greenhouse gases — and medical experts say both health-care providers and patients can do more to curb those emissions 

Health-care emissions make up about five per cent of Canada's greenhouse gases, according to family physician Dr. Samantha Green, a board member with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. 

"We can do a lot within health care to lower those emissions and hopefully, therefore, decrease climate-related injury, climate-related illness and climate-related death," Green said. 

For example, while global leaders gathered at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow on Monday, the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists released a consensus statement calling on anesthesia providers to boost environmental sustainability in their practices — by, among other options, choosing gases that have less environmental impact. 

Growing concern about health-care emissions has also prompted some Canadian medical professionals to launch awareness campaigns for both their colleagues and patients, offering avenues to switch or limit use of emission-producers.

From at-home medical devices, to anesthetic gases at the dentist's office or an operating room, there are multiple ways to make swaps or cut back.

Dr. Kimberly Wintemute is among the Canadian physicians on a crusade against one small device that poses a surprisingly big problem: inhalers.

Older styles of metered-dose inhalers contain high levels of hydrofluorocarbons which act as greenhouse gases when released into the atmosphere, according to the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems (CSHS), which is running a sustainable inhaler initiative led by Wintemute.

With millions of Canadians requiring inhalers for conditions like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), she says the emissions add up — with research showing that 100 puffs of a metered-dose inhaler equals close to a typical 300-kilometre car journey in terms of emissions. 

"We'd like to see a shift toward the dry-powder inhaler, and away from the metered-dose inhaler, for as many patients as we can," said Wintemute. "And then we'd also like to address the problem of too many inhalers being prescribed."

The sustainable inhaler initiative is hosting seminars for health-care professionals to break down the various inhaler options that don't spew out hydrofluorocarbons, in hopes more physicians will make the switch when prescribing.

"I think that a lot of medicine keeps on happening out of habit," said Wintemute.