Question

In what specific ways is the social environment related to health and illness in this country? (In your own words)

Answer 1

• Poor health outcomes are often made worse by the interaction between individuals and their social and physical environment. For example, millions of people in the United States live in places that have unhealthy levels of ozone or other air pollutants.
• Lack of access, or limited access, to health services greatly impacts an individual’s health status. For example, when individuals do not have health insurance, they are less likely to participate in preventive care and are more likely to delay medical treatment.
• The relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and physical and mental health, morbidity, disability, and mortality has been long and extensively documented. Socioeconomic position continues to be linked to the prevalence of disability and chronic and degenerative diseases, including cardiovascular disease, many cancers, and Alzheimer's disease.
• Low SES has resulted in poor physical and/or mental health by operating through various psychosocial mechanisms such as poor or "risky" health-related behaviours, social exclusion, prolonged and/or heightened stress, loss of sense of control, and low self- esteem as well as through differential access to proper nutrition and to health and social services.
• U.S. workers have a larger gender gap in earnings, which could potentially affect the health of women, and U.S. workers spend more time commuting to work which decreases cardiorespiratory fitness.
• U.S. residential environments are highly dominated by Americans’ reliance on private automobile transportation. This characteristic has promoted automobile-dependent development patterns with consequences for population density, land use mix, and walkability, all of which may have health implications. Cities in the United States tend to be less compact and have fewer public transportation and nonmotorized travel options and longer commuting distances than cities in other high-income countries.
• Food access is more inequitably distributed in the United States which creates problems of food access for vulnerable populations thus leading to malnutrition and other health diseases amongst the poor.
• U.S also has crime rate,there are a lot of neighbourhoods with violent crime that has been linked with low birth weight of the child and asthma problems in them.