Incorporating Environmental Health in Clinical Medicine

What are the objectives of 21st century healthcare? Five fundamental pillars and presuppositions appear to underscore the provision of clinical healthcare, whether conventional or alternative: (i) Healthcare should genuinely assist individuals (a) to prevent illness through health education; (b) to overcome and recover from disease and suffering when possible; (c) to receive compassionate and ongoing care when cure is no longer a reality. (ii) Healthcare should be based on credible scientific evidence rather than ideology, anecdote, or corporate science. (iii) Healthcare professionals should be competent, compassionate , and accountable for the care they provide. (iv) Outcome measures of healthcare approaches should be in place to determine evidence-based success and to protect the public interest. (v) Ongoing research to study proposed interventions is in the public interest and is required for the advancement of clinical care. While providers of clinical care, whatever the stripe, may share the same vision and objectives, twenty-first century healthcare is increasingly fragmented. We now have medicine The potpourri of healthcare disciplines and labels can be confusing and it is challenging to recount the ideology and practices peculiar to each faction. Each discipline brings something unique to the table and proponents often advance their particular interpretation of science and their interventions as the best way to deliver health and healing to the suffering masses. Yet, despite noble intentions and sincere aspirations by clinical practitioners from the differing groups, there is also escalating derision between assorted disciplines. Conventional and nonallopathic factions often accuse each other of lacking scientific credibility, of being deficient in evidence for various interventions, and of failing the public interest. All the while, rates of chronic mental and physical illness in both adults and children continue to escalate and to incapacitate so many suffering people [1, 2]. So with the ongoing dispersion of medical approaches, the rancour between competing ideologies, and the challenging state of health in much of the world's population, why do we need yet another branch of clinical medicine and why does the Journal of Environmental and Public Health publish a special issue to introduce and advance the clinical field of " Environmental Medicine " ? We endeavour to answer such questions in this publication. At the outset of the issue, S. Genuis aims to provide historical and contemporary evidence for the clinical field of environmental medicine as the preferred scientific approach to healthcare in an introductory piece entitled " What's out …