Social Determinants of Preventative Healthcare

With the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion asserting in 2024, “prevention is still the best medicine,” it becomes imperative to explore ways in which pervasive modern health disparities are influenced by a lack of access or quality of preventative health services. These services include everything from doctor’s visits to consistent medication and are one of the most important measures that patients can take to stay healthy. However, the non-medical aspects of peoples’ lives and the healthcare system that influence an individual’s health have a profound impact on the preventative healthcare a patient receives. The very life and death, health and illness of a patient often relies on these social determinants of health, such as a patient’s language, socioeconomic status, perceived education, and race, each of which interact with the socially dependent systems of doctor-patient relationships and commercialized health care to perpetuate appalling systemic inequalities in healthcare in the rural American south. In the following interview clips, North Carolina residents offer their own stories of preventative healthcare from the perspectives of a patient, provider, and loved one, shining light on the hardship of finding healthcare that truly works for the patient and the often fatal consequences for patients who fall through the cracks of the healthcare industry.

As a firm believer in preventative healthcare after her grandparents passed from symptoms caught too late, Maria Torres notes a worrying trend of her community avoiding preventative measures of healthcare, and highlights the importance of trustworthy doctor-patient relationships in reviving faith in the medical sector.

This concern is shared by Terry Alston Jones, whose grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was misdiagnosed by a doctor who dismissed her based on perceived education status, leading to an early death due to improper treatment. This biased dismissal is not a unique experience—despite Mirna Allende’s decades of medical experience, her worries over a genetic risk of cancer were similarly dismissed by her doctor due to his perception of her education status.

Tammy Blackman offers a provider’s perspective on the importance of proper communication in doctor-patient relationships, highlighting the patience required to properly convey to patients the benefits of preventive healthcare.

Extending beyond the determinants of a stable doctor-patient relationship, a patient’s ability to access preventive healthcare is often hindered by their financial hardships. Ana Maria Deaver highlights how financial hardship and socioeconomic differences, especially in rural areas, limit treatment options and force difficult choices, even leading elderly patients to choose between medicine and food.

These financial disparities reflect just one aspect of a brutally commercialized healthcare
industry. Nurse Marilyn T Cade recounts how this commercialization has led to the shutdown of critical health resources and facilities in the hospital where she worked, including a fully functional OB department that allowed her to have a risky delivery of twins.