Clinicians are key in reclaiming the medical arts ceded to clinically irrelevant technology and thereby aligning patient with fast-changing biological realities. Narrowing the chasm between virtual and real perceptions of health hazards requires: 1) becoming acutely aware of the habitat loss aggravating the pervasive dissemination of chemicals via conventional food, air, and consumer products and the proliferation of non-ionizing radiation; and 2) making strategic use of slow, system 2 thinking so as to respond wisely to the rampant epidemics of chronic low-dose toxicity disregarded or misdiagnosed for half a century. To respond adaptively, take a moment during each patient encounter to add chronic ambient poisoning to the differential diagnosis and investigate subtle symptoms and signs of irritation in vulnerable organ systems. Enacting adaptive response across our profession could ease the suffering of millions, help avert the sixth extinction, and contribute to continuation of evolved life as we know it.

As of now, anthropogenic habitat injury via dissemination of manufactured chemicals is injuring the world’s ecosystems, but doctors have yet to recognize its consequences to humans. Recognition of overt toxicity due to chronic low-dose exposure will open the door to diagnosis, sequential elimination studies, and prescriptions for preventive cure that represent a first step in preventing escalating chronic diseases. This paper offers a diagnostic construct for such use: chronic ambient poisoning. Incorporating it into clinical practice can reduce misdiagnosis of gastro- and near-toxicity that doctors and patients presently suppress rather than remove, and reduce patient co-dependence with proton-pump inhibitors, anxiolytics, and antidepressants—and the thriving “alternative” health industry. This diagnostic elephant-in-the-room is presently missed for reasons of habit (when an ailment is not recognized, it cannot be included in the differential diagnosis) and of poor conduct and interpretation of non-clinical research studies that are taken to mean an absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Moreover, modern methods fail when: the exposure comprises a “daily cocktail” of poisons acting additively, interactively, and cumulatively over a lifetime; when there is no normal, unexposed comparison group; and when absence of a robust etiopathogenetic model disallows inapt statistics. Only patient-led, consultant-informed sequential elimination studies can “peel the onion” of toxicity and its recognition and “preventive cure”. Clinical use of the chronic ambient poisoning diagnosis can thus open the door to stemming and reversing anthropogenic epidemics.