In this guest post, Ted Schrecker critically discusses the results of a recently published public health study in Canada. Illustrated are the hazardous implications of de-contextualized conceptualizations of health.

The notion that health is influenced by society, and the politics governing it, has been around for generations. The contemporary uptake of this idea can be found in the increasingly popular concept of ‘social determinants of health’. But should all social determinants be treated with equal concern? Or are certain determinants more important than others in influencing the health of populations?

By recognizing that health lies outside the medical system, US public health professionals acknowledge that health should no longer be defined as the responsibility of doctors. By accepting that health is amenable to political interventions, they should therefore also accept that its promotion becomes the responsibility of political actors.

Two major health inequality reports were recently released, one in the UK and the other in the US. This is the final post in a series which seeks to better understand the health perspective of these reports. Understanding variations in how health inequality research is pursued is important because health perspectives can undermine attention to the broader determinants of health inequalities and hinder the development of healthy public policies. While the true policy implications of the reports remain to be seen, the difference in health perspectives of the two reports is astounding.

Two major health inequality reports were recently released, one in the UK and the other in the US. This post is the third in a series which seeks to better understand the health perspective of these reports. In the first post we talked about the implications of how researchers frame their studies. In the second [...]

Establishing an evidence base on the social determinants of health is essential for the development of responsible public policy. In this post we will present six conceptual and theoretical challenges associated with generating, synthesizing and interpreting evidence on the social determinants of health.