Social Determinants

As a physician who cares for hundreds of patients with heart failure every year, I’m frequently humbled when, despite my best efforts, patients shuttle between hospital and home. I track the [...]

For years, public health advocates have argued that food deserts—neighborhoods without grocery stores or other fresh food vendors—contribute to a disproportionate burden of obesity and chronic [...]

In 1905, a Boston-based physician named Richard Cabot decided that medicine could do more to meet the social needs of patients. With his own money, he hired a nurse, Garnet Pelton, who began to [...]

For any political candidate running for office today, a central health-policy question is: What do you think of single payer? But perhaps a more fundamental question would be: What, exactly, do [...]

We usually think of innovations in health care—novel cancer treatments, cutting-edge surgical techniques, powerful imaging tests—as being developed in the U.S., and later diffusing to other [...]

In my more exasperated moments of residency, I must admit I was envious not only of what my supervising doctors knew, but also who they treated. Residents in our clinic, doctors in training just [...]

I didn’t think our relationship would last, but neither did I think it would end so soon. My patient had struggled with bipolar disorder his entire life, and his illness dominated our years [...]

My favorite medical diagnosis is “failure to thrive.” Not because patients are failing to thrive — that part makes me sad. But because of the diagnosis’s bold proposition: Humans, in their [...]