How can we all work together to eliminate the avoidable injustices
that plague our health care system and society?
Health is determined by far more than a person's choices and behaviors.
Social and political conditions, economic forces, physical environments,
institutional policies, health care system features, social
relationships, risk behaviors, and genetic predispositions all
contribute to physical and mental well-being. In America and around the
world, many of these factors are derived from a lingering history of
unequal opportunities and unjust treatment for people of color and other
vulnerable communities. But they aren't the only ones who suffer because
of these disparities--everyone is impacted by the factors that degrade
health for the least advantaged among us.
In Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? Dr. Lisa Cooper
shows how we can work together to eliminate the injustices that plague
our health care system and society. The book follows Cooper's journey
from her childhood in Liberia, West Africa, to her thirty-year career
working first as a clinician and then as a health equity researcher at
Johns Hopkins University. Drawing on her experiences, it explores how
differences in communication and the quality of relationships affect
health outcomes. Through her work as the founder and director of the
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, it details the actions and
policies needed to reduce and eliminate the conditions that are harming
us all.
Cooper reveals with compelling detail how health disparities are
crippling our health care system and society, driving up health care
costs, leading to adverse health outcomes and ultimately an enormous
burden of human suffering. Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's
Problem? demonstrates the ways in which everyone's health is
interconnected, both within communities and across the globe. Cooper
calls for a new kind of herd immunity, when a sufficiently high
proportion of people, across race and social class, become immune to
harmful social conditions through "vaccination" with solidarity among
groups and opportunities created by institutional and societal practices
and policies. By acknowledging and acting upon that interconnectedness,
she believes everyone can help to create a healthier world.
Features
- Raises readers' health care inequities literacy through an
approachable narrative with specific examples
- Introduces the concept of "herd immunity" as it applies to building
communal awareness of systemic injustices
- Features sections that underscore key takeaways
- Includes contributions from the world's leading minds through their
research findings and quotations
- Guides readers on what can be done at an individual level as a
patient, public health professional, and community member
- Includes inspiring stories of effective health equity studies and
practices around the world, from Ghana's ADHINCRA Project addressing
hypertension control to Baltimore's BRIDGE Study for depression in
African Americans and the Maryland and Pennsylvania-based RICH LIFE
Project for hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions
Johns Hopkins Wavelengths
In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around
the world, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors of Johns Hopkins
University are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of
the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book
series brings readers inside their stories, illustrating how their
pioneering discoveries benefit people in their neighborhoods and across
the globe in artificial intelligence, cancer research, food systems'
environmental impacts, health equity, science diplomacy, and other
critical arenas of study. Through these compelling narratives, their
insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to
boardrooms.
