The Expanding Scope of Social Determinants of Health

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines “social determinants of health” as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age,” including the health system. These conditions, WHO explains, are “shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels, which are themselves influenced by policy choices.”

The WHO’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, established in 2005 and reporting in 2008, helped bring this framework into the mainstream of global health discourse. Yet the concept has since expanded considerably.

This report examines how the use of the term “social determinants of health” and its synonyms have evolved in the major medical journals over the past decade, with the goal of illuminating both the growth of this discourse and the shifting content it conveys.

When physicians and medical journals weigh in on complex social and economic problems, they may oversimplify dynamics they do not fully understand, confuse correlation with causation, or lend the authority of medicine to policy prescriptions that are neither evidence-based nor practically feasible.

Continue reading the full report below.