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Social
Medicine has evolved around several core intellectual themes which,
when combined, define the central problematics that underlie and integrate
the varied departmental activities of research, service and education.
Social Roots
Diseases have social roots, and health requires the coordination of
health policies with social policies.
Social Inequalities
Inequalities based on social class, race, ethnicity, gender and global
relations contribute to inequalities in health conditions and access
to care.
Culture
Illness is an experience, often a powerful and a deeply interpersonal
experience that expresses and is created out of cultural values and
practices.
Medicine as a Moral Practice
Suffering and medical practice are moral processes that express and
create what is at stake in lived experience.
New Biotechnologies
Changes in medical knowledge and the production of new biotechnologies
create new social, cultural, political and economic realities, leading
inevitably to complex ethical challenges.
Globalization
Health and medicine are global enterprises, and globalization--a crucial
process of current social change--has an enormous impact on medicine.
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