Saving and Ignoring Lives: Physicians' Obligations to Address Root Social Influences on Health-Moral Justifications and Educational Implications

The predominant influences on health are social or upstream factors. Poverty, inadequate education, insecure and toxic environments, and inferior opportunities for jobs and positions are inequitable disadvantages that adversely affect health across the globe. Many causal pathways are yet to be understood. However, elimination of these social inequalities is a moral imperative of the first order. Some physicians by word and deed argue that medical doctors should oppose the structural violence of social inequalities that greatly shorten lives and wreak so much suffering. Copyright © 2010 Cambridge University Press.