Primary care physicians are uniquely positioned to go beyond the immediate needs of their patients. Everything from writing a prescription to examining the larger, more daunting socioeconomic and environmental factors that affect their patients’ health and well-being falls within their scope of work. “When physicians have a trusting relationship with their patients, there are things that are disclosed between the walls of an exam room that many people would not disclose otherwise,” says

"Não há fronteiras para os que exploram… não deve haver para os que lutam”—there are no borders for those who explore… there should not be for those who fight. This powerful statement was the rallying cry of representatives from dozens of waste picker organizations to the 2nd Latin American Congress. The gathering, held in 2005 in São Leopoldo, Brazil, unified a collection of marginalized peoples into a single voice calling for an end to unjust borders. Physical borders erected around landfills that, for many, were their only source of income. Sociocultural borders ...

Meet Sandra. Sandra is a former resident of Columbia Heights, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that used to be an affordable area to live. She’s now one of the thousands that are left struggling to make ends meet as the cost of living in Columbia Heights continues to skyrocket well above the national average. Like many others, Sandra now finds that the neighborhood she once called home has significantly surpassed her budget. ...

Closed. Out of Business. We are temporarily closed due to COVID. These signs have become a common sight in the windows of grocery stores scattered throughout the United States. Throughout the pandemic, the number of communities that have become food deserts, as well as the number of households that have become food insecure, has increased substantially. While volunteering at a local food pantry during the pandemic, I talked to a regular named Carmen, and she described her ...

Southwest Detroit is currently battling some of the worst air pollution in the country. In this area, where senior centers and elementary schools sit on the borders of oil refineries, residents suffer from high rates of asthma, cancer, and respiratory illness. Asthma hospitalization rates are

A Black trans dad, Kayden Coleman shares his clinical experience during his two pregnancies. He recounts horrible encounters with gestational care providers, such as being offered an abortion a “ridiculous” number of times, misgendered by physicians, virtually forgotten during his postpartum period, and even turned away from care.

For medical and public health practitioners working on the COVID-19 response, infectious disease is what we see all day every day. But when we look beneath the surface, we see the extent to which this infectious disease pandemic is fueled by an underlying chronic disease pandemic. Deemed its own

Throughout the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified many existing inequities in health care and throughout society. CommunityHealth, a free health clinic in Chicago, saw its patients face these ...

It’s an overcast Tuesday morning in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as Mary walks into the outpatient clinic for her groceries. The warm air in the lobby feels like a pleasant welcome from the blistery snow outside, but it’s the words spaghetti squash and salmon—two of her favorite items the pharmacy provides—written on the whiteboard that make her smile. The dietician at the ...