Getting It Right From the Start

Medical school has never been a real inspiration for this blog, although I admit it is somewhat hard to get inspired while dozing in class. For this time, however, school sparked a decent thought about what I could write for Blog Action Day 2009.

Every week, we have a plenary session where all discussion groups share the results of their exploration of a certain topic. Students are expected to discuss the basic sciences to discover the underlying processes of a condition. Yet, we kept delving more into clinical science than into the basic science such as physiology and biochemistry, to the dismay of our lecturers. Finally in the last plenary session, a lecturer sternly warned us about the danger of not grasping the basic concepts and skipping to the seemingly cooler stuffs.

Doctors are different from shamans because doctors need to understand how things work in the normal condition, how they go awry, and what causes the problems. Only after that doctors can make a diagnosis and set up a treatment plan. They don’t randomly stick syringes your arms or tell you to take a truckload of pills just because they like it – even if it is empirically proven to cure you.

That is exactly what hit me. In Indonesia, the issue of climate change has gone from tree-hugging obscurity to mainstream then to celebrity. It has become a must-chant mantra for politicians, a hot issue for gossiping moms, and a publicity mine for the stars. On the brighter side, it has engendered active movements from the people who are now aware of the problem. Green is definitely the new black.

This is irrefutably good. Blessed are those who reduce electricity use and print on both sides of a paper. Praise be to you who use public transportation and plant CO2-absorbing trees. Nevertheless, we don’t really know what is behind all these behavioral changes. Do people have the right idea about global warming or are they simply following the leader (or the star, whoever suits you better)? We can only see that people are practicing the “clinical science” of climate change, but have no idea whether their “basic science” foundation is firm enough.

I have heard of public figures claiming that the greenhouse effect is caused by the increasing amount of glass in our buildings. The fact that greenhouse is translated as rumah kaca – glass house- doesn’t help correct this mistake. Moreover, we never know if the green generation actually understands the “pharmacodynamics” of its Earth-saving methods. Do they know what good they are doing when they halve their paper usage? Do they realize why getting on the TransJakarta can help prevent islands from sinking? No survey has investigated into this matter.  Additionally, another frequent error is the hybridization global warming and the ozone hole, which can only grow out of an incorrect understanding of global warming’s “pathophysiology”.

It is very important to know whether people have got the right concept of climate change. The awareness and attention for this issue is a precious asset in the fight against global warming. On the other hand, it is very regrettable if that awareness and attention is built on unsteady ground, which makes the people an easy target of climate change skeptics.