Social Determinants of Health, Poverty and Christian Views Essay

Social determinants of health are the circumstances of a person's life that affect their health. They are conditions in the areas that individuals live, work, and interact, and are known to influence a wide variety of health risks and outcomes. They include insubstantial factors like socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors together with place-based elements such as access to education and healthcare, security, and availability of healthy food. Such social circumstances result in a stratification of the society. They are responsible for health inequalities among various different groups of individuals based on ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class (Meddings et al, 2017).

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Social determinants of health are one of the main causes of modern societal health dilemmas, including depression, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. To make matters worse, there are endless circles, feedback loops, and interactions among these determinants. For instance, a lack of education or poor health can prevent people from getting employment opportunities, a situation that leads to minimizes income. According to Marmot (2018), Individuals who earn low incomes have minimal access to nutritious food and health care and hence experience hardship. On its part, hardship induces stress and spurs people to adopt unhealthy coping mechanisms like overindulging in junk food, alcoholism, and drug abuse.

Poverty happens to be an influential social determinant of health. Poverty restricts access to safe neighborhoods and healthy food, making it likely that poor people will be unhealthy. Poverty and inequalities in wealth distribution are among the biggest challenges to society's wealth is a related issue together with its possession, creation, distribution, and people's attitude towards it. There is a general perception that poverty is a major barrier to any barrier to any kind of human development. All across the world, the gap between the rich and the poor is gradually rising, even in the richest developed country. The situation has a major impact on the general Christian worldview.

On matters to do with poverty and wealth, Christianity outlines individual ethics in the community's context. People who are economically well-off are obligated to help the disadvantaged. However, it does not shed light on which is to blame if an individual is poor: could it be hardship circumstances beyond his or her control, or failure on their part to put some effort. In the United States, religion is a major predictor of how people look at poverty. For instance, Christians are more likely to think of poverty as resulting from individual failings. There seems to be a strong Christian inclination to perceive paucity as being deeply rooted in ethics and morality. The Bible makes it clear that poor financial decisions, unwillingness to work hard and dysfunctional families will make someone poor. According to the Christian worldview, all poverty is as a result of sin although does not necessarily mean the sins of the poor person (Smith, 2018).

Conclusion

Theologians quote various parables, passages, and verses in the Bible that influence Christian's perception of poverty. For example, second Thessalonians chapter 3 verse 10 says, "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat." Also, Jesus always told his followers that they should take care of needy people like those who are sick, disables, and in prison. The general perception among Christians is that any able-bodied person of sound mind should be able to put sufficient effort to avoid poverty.

References

Marmot, M. (2018). Medical Care, Social Determinants of Health, and Health Equity. World Medical & Health Policy, 10(2), 195-197.

Meddings, J., Reichert, H., Smith, S. N., Iwashyna, T. J., Langa, K. M., Hofer, T. P., & McMahon, L. F. (2017). The impact of disability and social determinants of health on condition-specific readmissions beyond Medicare risk adjustments: a cohort study. Journal of general internal medicine, 32(1), 71-80.

Smith, P. (2018). Capitalism, poverty and Christian Charity. Quadrant, 62(4), 72.