The pursuit of health equity requires public health and medical professionals to become adept at policy in their health advocacy work. The American Public Health Association (APHA), in fact, defines policy work as one of its 10 essential public health services. APHA says professionals should be capable of “creating, championing and implementing policies, plans and laws”.… Read More »
The Medical Care Blog is returning from its summer break this month. We hope you are feeling recharged and ready to dig deep again into health care and public health. We’re beginning with a series of retrospective posts to highlight the work of our contributors on prominent topics. This week, we focus on a collection… Read More »
Measuring and addressing social drivers of health are important in cancer research. Part 1 of this series, published in March 2022, described three commonly used area-level SDoH indices. None are not able to explain much variation in cancer mortality rates. In this post, I share results from a new model that shows promise. Methods in… Read More »
It is not too late to fix the US healthcare system. But every day spent in this folly, the problem gets worse. It is time to move this conversation forward. We are excited to share that in November 2021, the American Public Health Association (APHA) formally adopted a policy statement titled “Adopting a Single-Payer Health… Read More »
As a public health researcher, I love data, the more the better. I held this belief until I found that I myself had become the “subject” of research without my consent. This experience made me rethink ethical research. The more data, the better? In 2017, I encountered a state-level bill that required all the government… Read More »
Understanding internet access through a human rights framework has been a goal of human rights advocates for years. But COVID-19 has brought the idea of “broadband as a human right” to the forefront as a necessary and urgent human need. A recent study exploring the Social Determinants of Health and COVID-19 mortality, found that individuals without… Read More »
In our first blog post of this series, we discussed how the current medical approach misses so much of what influences health, and how it perpetuates health inequities in our society. In this post, we go in-depth on the elements of Whole Person Health (WPH) that are necessary components of a just and equitable approach… Read More »
Our current U.S. medical system doesn’t work. It is not able to adequately care for the sickest, most vulnerable, and least resourced people. It often excludes those seen as “other” in our society. To become a just system, we need a new focus on Whole Person Health (WPH). Very briefly, WPH cares for the whole person and… Read More »
In 1981, Doll and Peto published a well-known paper estimating that roughly 75-80% of cancer mortality was preventable. Forty years later, cancer mortality has declined some overall – but we still see vast disparities. Some of these disparities have gotten worse over time. With the Biden administration’s reignited Cancer Moonshot initiative, combined with a renewed… Read More »
The opioid epidemic and substance use disorders have garnered national attention as overdose deaths continue at an alarming rate. Synthetic opioids – chiefly fentanyl – are the culprit in many of those deaths. The Commission’s report Earlier this month, the bipartisan Congressional Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking, with representatives from many Federal agencies and… Read More »
In this episode of our podcast series, Samyuktha Anand, secretary-elect for the Medical Care section, recaps the blog posts we published in January. Next, Jess Williams, co-editor, interviews Nien Chen Li about her recently published paper — a winner of the APHA Medical Care Section’s Student Paper Award in 2020. Dr. Li’s paper is about… Read More »