Whither social determinants of health?

Abstract

This critical commentary extends the debate on social determinants of health and disease. Its main argument is that while further studies are unnecessary to demonstrate the fundamentally social distribution of health outcomes, extant analyses rarely engage with the fact that poverty and other forms of oppression are political choices made by societies, which are both contemporaneously contingent and historically situated. This view must guide research and debate in the area so that studies intending to bring injustice to light do not end up naturalizing it. Research based on this fundamental understanding may help to overcome the narrow scope of multicausal black box approaches, which do not analyze the interrelations among determinants and make only a limited contribution to the construction of healthy societies.