e live in an interconnected world where both social challenges and human opportunities increasingly arise and fall in correlation to factors far beyond any one individual, community, or government’s control.
As SDG3 calls on stakeholders to ensure health for all, progress along those lines is not only about physical health at the individual level (i.e.: early detection of diabetes in high–risk communities), but equally reliant on social factors far beyond individual decision making (i.e.: food deserts that leave individuals more prone to consuming a high–risk diet for becoming diabetic).
Despite the notable improvements documented in the past decade on a plethora of health–related life outcome metrics, how we tackle health in high– to low–income economies still remains stuck in a personal prerogative paradigm: That ultimately, with the exception of being born with a debilitating health challenge, one’s health is the outcome of decisions they make throughout their journey and key life choices (smoking, abusing drugs, or eating fatty foods). Yet so many of our choices, including the quality of the food, air, and water we consume, how sedentary or active a society we are born into, and how we are socialized to relate to our physical health and the value we place on it, are socially determined. All essential factors in the quality of health outcomes are at the individual level but can only be addressed at the social level.
At a time when the immense value of measuring and tracking the dimensions of wellbeing on the individual and social level is finally beginning to gain traction in the mainstream, the drivers of those dimensions, and the social paradigms in which individual’s health decisions are made remain a distant detail in the policy discourse around SDG3.
Without a more holistic approach to physical health that begins at both ends of the spectrum (individual health decisions and the social mega trends that drive them), ‘primordial prevention’ remains a reality only for the privileged few whose financial means and social capital can transcend the social risk factors that deplete individual health.
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The ongoing cost of ignoring the social determinants of health
Children gathering water in India. Image by Gyan Shahane from Unsplash.
July 15, 2024
SDG3 challenges us to address health disparities beyond individual choices, highlighting social determinants like food deserts and environmental factors. Shifting from a personal prerogative paradigm to holistic approaches would ensure health equity for all, writes Mohamed Younis.
W
e live in an interconnected world where both social challenges and human opportunities increasingly arise and fall in correlation to factors far beyond any one individual, community, or government’s control.
As SDG3 calls on stakeholders to ensure health for all, progress along those lines is not only about physical health at the individual level (i.e.: early detection of diabetes in high–risk communities), but equally reliant on social factors far beyond individual decision making (i.e.: food deserts that leave individuals more prone to consuming a high–risk diet for becoming diabetic).
Despite the notable improvements documented in the past decade on a plethora of health–related life outcome metrics, how we tackle health in high– to low–income economies still remains stuck in a personal prerogative paradigm: That ultimately, with the exception of being born with a debilitating health challenge, one’s health is the outcome of decisions they make throughout their journey and key life choices (smoking, abusing drugs, or eating fatty foods). Yet so many of our choices, including the quality of the food, air, and water we consume, how sedentary or active a society we are born into, and how we are socialized to relate to our physical health and the value we place on it, are socially determined. All essential factors in the quality of health outcomes are at the individual level but can only be addressed at the social level.
At a time when the immense value of measuring and tracking the dimensions of wellbeing on the individual and social level is finally beginning to gain traction in the mainstream, the drivers of those dimensions, and the social paradigms in which individual’s health decisions are made remain a distant detail in the policy discourse around SDG3.
Without a more holistic approach to physical health that begins at both ends of the spectrum (individual health decisions and the social mega trends that drive them), ‘primordial prevention’ remains a reality only for the privileged few whose financial means and social capital can transcend the social risk factors that deplete individual health.
