Perspectives on Health Inequalities

Sustaining Health for Wealth: Perspectives for the Post-2015 Agenda; Comment on “Improving the World’s Health Through the Post-2015 Development Agenda: Perspectives From Rwanda”

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) offer a unique opportunity for policy-makers to build on the millennium development goals (MDGs) by adopting more sustainable approaches to addressing global development challenges. The delivery of health services is of particular concern. Most African countries are unlikely to achieve the health MDGs, however, significant progress has been made particul...

Gender and health inequalities: intersections with other relevant axes of oppression

Gender and health inequalities: intersections with other relevant axes of oppression T he risk of disease, disability, and mortality as well as access to health services are unfairly distributed among the population, with certain groups bearing an unequally larger burden of ill health and poorer access to care due to gender, sexual identity/orientation, ethnic background, or class. According to...

Desperately seeking reductions in health inequalities: perspectives of UK researchers on past, present and future directions in health inequalities research

Following government commitments to reducing health inequalities from 1997 onwards, the UK has been recognised as a global leader in health inequalities research and policy. Yet health inequalities have continued to widen by most measures, prompting calls for new research agendas and advocacy to facilitate greater public support for the upstream policies that evidence suggests are required. How...

Recent advances: International perspectives on health inequalities and policy.

The Errors of Individualistic Public Health Interventions: Denial of Treatment to Obese Persons; Comment on “Denial of Treatment to Obese Patients—the Wrong Policy on Personal Responsibility for Health”

I agree entirely with Nir Eyal’s perspective that denying treatment to obese patients is morally wrong. However, the reasons for this belief differ in some ways from Eyal’s analysis. In this commentary, I will try to explain the similarities and differences in our perspectives. My primary claim is that the denial of treatment to obese patients is wrong principally because (i) it eschews a whole...