6 Determinants of Health - Synthesis

Question 1

Bircher & Kuruvilla – Defining “Health”

Answer 1

“Health is a state of well-being emergent from the conducive interactions between individuals’ potentials, life’s demands, and social and environmental determinants” (see Figure 1 in the article for a visual of this concept)
Health = in the context of your environment, your potential is enough to successfully meet life’s demands and live in well-being

Question 2

Demands of life bircher and kuruvilla

Answer 2

Individials’s potentuials include BIOLOGICALLY GIVEN (your body at birth) and PERSONALLY ACQUIRED (everything else, experiences, resources, etc) – the sum of the two together determines our ability to meet the demands of life (see Figure 2 in the article for a visual of this concept)

Question 3

Krieger & Davey-Smith – “Bodies Count” and Body Counts

Answer 3

“We literally embody the world in which we live.” Embodiment = the representation or expression of something in a tangible visible form (in this case, the tangible visible form being the human body; you are what you eat, but even broader than that)

“Our embodied selves are simultaneously SOCIAL BEINGS and BIOLOGIC ORGANISMS” (see Table 2 in the article for several examples of these concepts)
Bodies reproduce, bodies develop, bodies grow, bodies exist and move in time and space, bodies interact (sounds like the life course perspective from earlier this semester!)

Question 4

Link & Phelan – Social conditions are the fundamental causes of disease: social context importance

Answer 4

“Proximal causes” of disease (behavioral and biological risk factors) exist in a social context, and we need to understand the social context that influences behavior and biology if we hope to intervene effectively on those proximal causes to prevent disease

Question 5

Link & Phelan – Social conditions are the fundamental causes of disease: fundamental causes

Answer 5

“Fundamental causes” of disease (social conditions) cannot be adequately mitigated only by dealing with the intervening “proximal causes” because the fundamental causes work through multiple pathways that always go beyond the known proximal causes; therefore, to solve the problem of social causes of disease, we must deal with the social causes directly