Muntaner C
Prevention Research Center and Institute of Occupational and Environmental Health, School of Medicine, West Virginia University, Morgantown 26506-9190, USA.
Scand J Public Health. 1999 Sep;27(3):161-5.
This article examines some of the main threats and new opportunities encountered by teachers of social inequalities in health in contemporary academia. Focusing mostly on the recent US and European experiences, I suggest that lay world views legitimating social inequalities are often in conflict with explanations arising from social epidemiology and medical sociology. The dominance of medicine in public health, through its often implicit assumptions about the biological determinants of human behaviour, is also identified as a barrier to teaching social inequalities in health. Educational elitism, which restricts higher education to members of the upper middle class, is identified as another barrier to teaching social inequalities in health. On the other hand, teachers in this field can benefit from a recent growth of empirical studies during the last decade aimed at understanding the social determinants of health inequalities. Finally, I suggest that familiarity with current critical scholarship within public health, as well as the use of techniques developed by sociologists to teach social stratification, can be valuable resources for teaching social inequalities in health.
本文探讨了当代学术界健康领域社会不平等问题的教师所面临的一些主要威胁和新机遇。主要聚焦于美国和欧洲近期的经验，我认为使社会不平等合法化的外行世界观往往与社会流行病学和医学社会学产生的解释相冲突。医学在公共卫生领域的主导地位，通过其对人类行为生物学决定因素的隐含假设，也被视为健康领域社会不平等教学的障碍。将高等教育限制在上层中产阶级成员的教育精英主义，被视为健康领域社会不平等教学的另一个障碍。另一方面，该领域的教师可以从过去十年旨在理解健康不平等社会决定因素的实证研究的近期增长中受益。最后，我认为熟悉公共卫生领域当前的批判性学术研究，以及运用社会学家开发的技术来教授社会分层，对于健康领域社会不平等的教学可能是宝贵的资源。
