Op-Ed: Medicine’s identity crisis: When ‘health’ means everything

For nearly a decade, the most influential medical journals in the world have been telling medical professionals that almost everything is their business: housing markets, immigration status, climate change, criminal justice, internet access, even colonialism.

The concept driving this expansion is “social determinants of health” (SDOH). The World Health Organization defines the term as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age,” including the health system itself – conditions that the WHO says are “shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national, and local levels.”

Originally centered on material circumstances, the concept of SDOH has grown far more expa...