HLTH260 Chapter Notes - Chapter 21: Earned Income Tax Credit, Rudolf Virchow, Gradshteyn And Ryzhik
10 Jul 2019
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Document Summary
The idea that economic health, and in particular poverty, is an important determinant of physical and mental health is not new. Rudolph virchow, a nineteenth-century physician often referred to as the father of social medicine, argued that poverty increased people"s susceptibility to disease and resulted in a reduced life expectancy. More recent times have seen the accumulation of a substantial literature documenting not just the impact of poverty, but also the power of the "social gradient of health. " These findings show significant health disparities in acute and chronic disease, self-reports of health, and life expectancy according to social class, such that each higher step up the economic ladder is associated with better health (e. g. , marmot et al. Thus a graph of earning deciles (the bottom 10 percent, the next 10 percent, and so on, up to the top 10 percent) indicates a systematic increase in life expectancy for each decile over the one immediately below.
