Health disparities

Definition

Health disparities in plain English

This is the simple, uncomfortable fact that how healthy you are often depends less on your biology and more on the hand you're dealt — how much money your family has, your race, your gender, and even your zip code. Two people can get the same illness but end up with very different outcomes because one lives near a good hospital, has insurance, and can afford healthy food, while the other doesn't. Those background life circumstances are called the 'social determinants of health,' and doctors care about them because you can't fix a patient's health by only looking at what's happening inside their body.

Learn these first

• Demographic transition
• Social institutions

Related MCAT terms

• Absolute threshold
• Big Five personality (OCEAN)
• Classical conditioning
• Cognitive dissonance
• Demographic transition
• Endocrine hormones (key)
• Erikson's psychosocial stages
• Fundamental attribution error
• Heuristic
• Independent variable