I want to start by explaining the name of this blog, because it basically sums up everything I care about.

When my grandmother passed away from pancreatic cancer, which came after years of smoking, I thought I wanted to go into medicine to help treat diseases like the one that took her. That was my first reaction. But the more time I spent shadowing doctors, volunteering at a hospital, and reading about health, the more I noticed something that kind of changed how I think. A lot of the health problems people end up in the hospital for didn’t start in the hospital. They started years earlier, with things like smoking, stress, no access to healthy food, or never getting screened for something in time.

That’s the whole idea behind “health before healthcare.” Healthcare is what happens when you’re already sick. Health is everything that comes before that, and honestly it’s where I think the biggest difference can be made.

There’s actually a name for all the stuff that shapes our health before we ever see a doctor. The World Health Organization calls them the social determinants of health, and they describe it as the conditions where people are born, grow, live, work, and age. The WHO points out that most of our health is decided by these non-medical things, like education, food, and housing, way more than by the medical care we get.

I’m not saying doctors and hospitals don’t matter. Obviously they do, and I’ve seen amazing care up close. But if most of our health is decided before we ever walk into a clinic, then it seems like we should be paying a lot more attention to that part. So that’s what I’m going to write about here.