social determinants of health

Our suffering, our diagnosis and our treatment are far from objective or apolitical. If you are a marginalised person, your experience of all three of these things is likely going to be worse.

Stress can change the body at a cellular level.

A cardiologist, endocrinologist, obesity specialist, health economist and social epidemiologists all said versions of the same thing: Striving to get ahead in an unequal society contributes to people in the United States aging quicker, becoming sicker and dying younger.

Weathering doesn’t start in middle age.

It begins in the womb. Cortisol released into a pregnant person’s bloodstream crosses the placenta, which helps explain why a disproportionate number of babies born to parents who live in impoverished communities or who experience the constant scorn of discrimination are preterm and too small

Life brings an accumulation of unremitting stress, especially for those subjected to inequity — and not just from immediate and chronic threats. Even the anticipation of those menaces causes persistent damage.

“I don’t think most people understand weathering stress. Stress is such a vague term,” Geronimus said. “But it still gives us a leverage point to get in there and see a more complex and more frightening picture of what it does to people’s bodies and whose bodies it does it to.”

She said she was trying to capture two things. First, that people’s varied life experiences affect their health by wearing down their bodies. And second, she said: “People are not just passive victims of these horrible exposures. They withstand them. They struggle against them. These are people who weather storms.”

People seem to instinctively