Inside the American Board of Pediatrics’ ‘Climate Change’ Certification Course

In June 2021, the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) launched a new course titled “The Impact of Climate Change on Pediatric Health Care,” that is intended to educate board-certified pediatricians about climate change.

The course is approved for “maintenance of certification” credit, meaning that its completion counts toward pediatricians renewing their board certification.

Although justified on the basis of enabling pediatricians to better care for patients, Do No Harm obtained several excerpts from the module that reveal many of the questions have little to do with clinical practice.

One question, for instance, includes the model answer that “changing to a vegan diet contributes to reducing climate change […].”

However, Drs. Lisa Patel and Karina Maher, two primary authors of the course, wrote that understanding the impact of climate change will improve clinical practice.

“Understanding these health effects will improve the clinician’s ability to counsel, treat, and care for their patients,” they wrote. “Learning how climate change does not affect every person equally is an important step towards recognizing that structural racism can determine health outcomes.”

Another question’s model answer includes a statement about higher rates of asthma in “redlined” communities.

Meanwhile, another slide opines on the disparity in assets between the “average Black American family” and the average “White American family.”

Another model answer stated that prenatal exposure to air pollutants could potentially impact the development of a person’s offspring, and specifically that exposure to fossil fuels could lead to developmental delays.

The course represents the increasing mission creep in the medical profession, in which medical associations increasingly take political and social positions on issues outside the purview of clinical practice.

The premise of the module, that a changing climate impacts public health, may well be true; but that does not then mean that physicians should undergo training in climate science as part of their maintenance of certification. 

That same logic would entail advising physicians to become educated on just about every facet of modern society; from urban planning to criminal justice to the logistics of food distribution; that could conceivably impact public health.

There is no consistent limiting principle, and it’s hard to see how questions as to whether a vegan diet “contributes to reducing climate change” are germane to the practice of pediatric medicine. 

The ABP should certify pediatricians based on competencies relevant to the practice of medicine.