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Social determinants of health are becoming increasingly mainstream.
From health plans to health lawyers to Secretary Alex Azar, seemingly everyone in the healthcare realm now acknowledges that social determinants are a legitimate cause of poor health outcomes and health disparities and, more importantly, need to be addressed.
Now a new series in the New England Journal of Medicine is encouraging physicians to think beyond the social determinants of health to address the “structural determinants” of health.
While social determinants are “the seemingly static characteristics that mark inequalities,” structural determinants are “the social, political, and economic forces that drive these inequalities in the first place.”