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The carbon emissions of global healthcare activities make up 4%-5% of total world emissions, with the majority coming from industrialised countries. The solution to healthcare carbon reduction in these countries, ostensibly, would be preventive healthcare, which is less resource intensive than corrective healthcare in itself and, as a double benefit, reduces carbon by preventing diseases which may require higher healthcare carbon to treat. This leads to a paradox: preventive healthcare is designed to give humans longer, healthier lives. But, by extending life spans, the carbon emissions of a person increase both over a lifetime and in the medical industry overall. At the same time, the need for higher carbon end-of-life care does not disappear, particularly in resource intensive countries. This article will first identify sources of healthcare carbon, focusing on the industrialised world, and explain various efforts towards healthcare carbon reduction, which include preventive healthcare. Second, it will develop the 'paradox of prevention'-that preventive healthcare may save healthcare carbon by proximally reducing the need for medical treatments, but also, paradoxically, result in more healthcare carbon both in an individual's life and in the medical industry. The third section will offer ethical principles for approaching the paradox of prevention. The conclusion will emphasise the need for institutional approaches to healthcare carbon reduction in the industrialised world, which will relieve some of the tensions of healthcare industry decarbonisation and individual healthcare carbon use., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

Planetary health is not only a new field of research and practice; it is also a moral ideal. What are the implications for medicine and health care? In this article, we argue that within this ideal, health of humans, animals and also nature are worthy of protection for their own sake. These values can reinforce each other, but they may also conflict. We formulate a general framework that provides some direction for ethical reflection. Next we discuss implications of the ideal of planetary health for zoonotic disease outbreaks, for environmental sustainability of health care, and for global health and solidarity in the face of climate change. Planetary health demands much from health care, and this will also further exacerbate existing policy dilemmas.

The United States health care industry is the second largest in the world, expending an estimated 479 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon dioxide per year, nearly 8 percent of the country's total emissions. The importance of carbon reduction in health care is slowly being accepted. However, efforts to "green" health care are incomplete since they generally focus on buildings and structures. Yet hospital care and clinical service sectors contribute the most carbon dioxide within the U.S. health care industry, with structures/equipment and pharmaceuticals ranking as the third and fourth highest emitters in the industry. Given the magnitude of health care carbon emissions-and the paucity of attention to the carbon of hospital care and clinical services-this essay identifies overuse of health care as a health threat with serious ethical implications, offers a data-driven action plan for carbon reduction in health care, and provides practical suggestions for more sustainable health care delivery in the United States., (© 2022 The Hastings Center.)

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After exploring specific discrepancies in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution., (© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)