Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is about jobs and employment, education, the environment, and all of those things that go into making us healthy.
Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
Protecting lives means reshaping national policies from a community healthcare angle.
The fact is, many poor patients visit ERs simply because they don't have a family doctor.
Our health care system is terribly broken… Health comes from much more than health care and health care is much more than hospitals. We do a good job on treatment and a terrible job on prevention.
A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.
A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.
We must form public-private partnerships to collectively improve children's health.
Our calling is not only to pull people out of the river, but to go upstream to find out what or who is pushing them in.
To effectively fight the coronavirus crisis, we have to make sure that every person has access to quality, affordable health coverage.
Since 1975, violence has been recognized as a public health problem, in large part to former Surgeon Generals Dr. Koop and Dr. Satcher's pioneering efforts to make the health approach a national priority. Since then, we've seen that violence can be curbed - and stopped - if we treat it as we would any other epidemic health concern.
The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
There's this narrative that is entrenched in some of the professions that there's this mysterious thing called 'socioeconomic status' that is immutably correlated with health. And it isn't.
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
If you want to prevent abortions, you make sure everyone has health care, a high school education and birth control. Not the exact opposite.
Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.
Health is more than absence of disease; it is about economics, education, environment, empowerment, and community. The health and well being of the people is critically dependent upon the health system that serves them. It must provide the best possible health with the least disparities and respond equally well to everyone.
Things like depression and obesity are global challenges.
Nowhere are the divisions of race and ethnicity more sharply drawn than in the health of our people.
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
I brought together experts from health care, business, academic institutions, and the community to develop a comprehensive blueprint for eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care in the City of Boston.
Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.
The United States has the best sick care system in the world, however, the health care system remains fragmented and limited, particularly for African Americans who carry a disproportionate burden of disease, hunger, homelessness, and poverty.
I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.
...In a world riven by inequity, medicine could be viewed as social justice work.
