Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health
Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health
Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health
What is Health?
o It is a state of complete physical, psychological and social
well being
o We are not just preventing bad things from happening
o Not only looking at bad things but making good things
happen
o Millions of people are in poor health, in the U.S diabetes
for example, big chunk of population has diabetes.
o CDC report that there are basically 5 factors that account
for pre-mature immortality
Defining the Problem?
o Defining health or disease, why does it matter how we
define health or disease?
If looking through singe lens we may miss something
o Who is responsible for fixing, it if obesity is individual
problem, is individual responsible for fixing it, dont worry
about lunch nutrition, how we define the problem will guide
us on how we approach it.
Example: What is Addiction?
o Conflicting views, whether addiction is a disease,
scientifically it is a disease, but a lot of people think of it as
will power, why did you start using drugs, is it a personal
problem, do we need to look at drug policies. How we
define it will tell us how we approach it.
Determinants of Health: What makes us Healthy (Or Not)?
o Most people think of do you have good doctor, good health
care this is what most people think of in terms of what
makes us health or not
o The U.S leads the world in medical research and health
care spending
o For how much we spend we should be a whole lot more
healthier, if health care makes us healthy the more we
spend on it we should get more out of it
o The two that are next to each other is Cuba and U.S the
cost ration is tremendously different, spend 4500 dollars
more than Cuba to get more life expectancy.
Life Expectancy vs. Spending
o Outlier is United States
o This tells that health care doesnt really have correlation to
health