A new report from medical watchdog Do No Harm warns of the harmful rise of social ideology in medicine. The report found that medical journals have tripled their engagement with non-health related factors such as environmental, economic, and social well-being over the past decade.
Expansion of Social Determinants of Health
The World Health Organization defines social determinants of health (SDOH) as the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. However, the report argues that the expansion of the SDOH framework is a serious cause for concern, as it may allow harmful ideologies to influence healthcare.
According to Ian Kingsbury, senior director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, introducing new areas outside a physician’s scope is a tool to advance a leftist political ideology rather than allowing providers to focus on high-quality patient care.
Key Findings
The report listed several striking trends, including a surge in discussion of race/ethnicity, racism/racial discrimination, and discrimination as it pertains to SDOH. The report also found that the scope of SDOH has expanded to include environmental and climate-related factors.
The report warned that the risk of influential policymakers framing an extraordinarily wide swath of issues as matters of healthcare is not merely imprecision but overreach. Physicians and researchers making causal claims about complex social systems they are not equipped to evaluate and lending the authority of medical science to policy prescriptions whose effectiveness and feasibility have not been established.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
