Climate Change and Medicine

For over a century, conventional medicine has largely focused on one side of the equation: identify the pathogen → formulate a drug to kill it → develop a stronger drug when the old one becomes resistant.

Diseases that were once easily treatable are becoming increasingly difficult to manage, while new and re-emerging infections continue to appear. In 2019 alone, antibacterial resistance was associated with more than six million deaths worldwide. The new Ebola bundibugyo strain that now needs new drugs and vaccines.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance

Rising temperatures due to climate change facilitate the proliferation of bacteria. Several studies have demonstrated temperature-dependent increases in infections caused by drug-resistant pathogens in hospital and community settings and associations between higher ambient temperatures and the prevalence of AMR among bacterial and fungal pathogens.

This reminded me of the opening scene of The Last of Us where a scientist warns that humanity's greatest threat may not be war or nuclear weapons, but climate change. His argument is simple: if the planet becomes warmer, fungi will eventually adapt to survive at human body temperature, removing one of our natural biological defenses. At the time, the scene felt like speculative fiction. Today, while the series remains fictional, scientists are increasingly reporting that climate change is influencing the evolution and spread of microbes and increasing antimicrobial resistance. The concern is no longer whether climate affects infectious disease, the question is how much.

Stronger drug or stronger person?

Is building better antibiotics building better health? Or is the sensitivity of the host more important than the virulence of the pathogen? As the overall health of a population declines, organisms that were previously harmless or only mildly pathogenic can produce increasingly severe disease.

The antimicrobial resistance crisis invites us to reconsider a broader question: should the future of medicine focus exclusively on developing stronger weapons against microorganisms, or should it focus on strengthening the resilience of the person infected with it?

As our climate, pathogens and health continue to evolve, so must our understanding of what it truly means to fight disease.

Conventional medicine has achieved success by identifying pathogens and designing targeted antimicrobial agents but homeopathic medicine achieved success by making the person more resilient. Growing antimicrobial resistance reminds us that a healthcare system built around continually escalating antimicrobial therapy faces evolutionary limits.

Homeopathy and infectious diseases

The idea of strengthening the person rather than focusing solely on the pathogen is not new. Since its inception over 200 years ago, homeopathy has been based on the principle of stimulating the individual's inherent capacity to recover from illness. Rather than targeting bacteria or viruses directly, treatment is personalised according to the patient's symptoms, with the aim of improving their adaptive response to disease. Individuals with higher levels of health are less susceptible to severe infectious diseases and recover more efficiently when they do become ill. Historically, homeopathy gained prominence during epidemics such as cholera, scarlet fever, typhus and typhoid in the nineteenth century.

Medicine cannot exist in isolation from the world around it. The greatest breakthroughs of the future may come not only from discovering stronger drugs, but from building healthier, more resilient people.