Social Determinants Of Health Care Essay

A determinant of health and/or illness is a variable or group of variables that directly or indirectly influences the distribution of diseases. These determinants can be individual, physical, or in this case social. These social determinants of health are "the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels." (WHO, 2018). This plays a large part in how health is distributed across the country. A couple of the largest disputes within the health care system are the relationships between sex/gender and health as well as race/ethnicity and health. First, sex is biologically assigned while gender is a socially assigned role. So, whether a person was born a male and identifies as so, or as a female, or vice versa, should it influence the quality of care they receive? There are gender inequalities across the entire field of health care. Stigmas are still …show more content…
In the United States, environmental racism is when pollution and hazardous materials are more prevalent in a concentrated area where mostly people of color are living. This sounds pretty easy to fix; "Just tell the factories and such they cannot omit chemicals in these places.". The problem is that these corporations are putting off legal amounts of wastes, therefore they cannot get in trouble for it. But when there are multiple factories putting off legal amounts of hazardous chemicals in a concentrated area, the well-being of the people living there are compromised quite drastically. This can be seen in examples such as the Flint Water Crisis and Louisiana's Cancer Alley. In both of these situations, the pollution took place in cities that were mostly people of color and living in poverty. In both of these situations it is evident that the fundamental cause theory is taking