Crash Course: Public Health

We often think of health as a self-centric phenomenon that begins and ends with "me", but as we'll explore throughout this series our personal health is just one plot line in a rich story of evolving research and policies that make up the world of public health. So what is public health anyway? Well, public health is an approach to preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health for literally everyone. It is a money-saving, life-extending, world-bettering cheat code for improving the world, so we'll spend the rest of this series examining how and where it is working, where it isn't working, and how so much of our health is influenced by the world around us.

Today, we are going to begin our discussion on the determinants of health which are all of the conditions we are born, live, and work in that have an influence on our overall wellbeing. Now these determinants can span everything from your education level to income level to genetic code, so today we're just going to focus on the biological factors like our age, genes, and sex, and take a closer look at their impacts.

There is no denying the effect that our environment has on us. Things like water and air pollution are detrimental to our health. In this episode of Crash Course Public Health, we’ll take a look at some of the ways our environment impacts us, why marginalized and low-income populations are disproportionately exposed to environmental pollution, and what we can do about it.

Society does a lot to improve our health, from sanitation to healthy foods. But society can have negative impacts on our health as well, and whether or not we get the positive impacts or the negative ones, can often come down to social and economic standing. In this episode of Crash Course Public Health, we’re going to take a look at some of the basic societal elements that affect our health, and why they are often tied to economic inequality.

Our identities, societies, and health are all mixed together in cool, weird, and often deeply unfair ways. One of the big factors that comes out of that mix is stress. Stress impacts our health in a number of ways. In this episode of Crash Course Public Health, we’re going to go beyond the basics and look at the ways society affects our stress, which in turn impacts our health.

Epidemiology is the study of patterns of diseases. And most people might think that means epidemiologists are only studying things like Ebola. But the truth is much more varied. In this episode of Crash Course Public Health, we'll take a look at the different ways Epidemiology is conducted, including the use of...pie? It'll make sense, we promise.

Are you ready for the understatement of the century? Health care is complicated. Across the 200 or so countries on Earth, there are a lot of different ways people receive health care. In this episode of Crash Course Public Health, we’re going to break down the building blocks that are used to create a health care system and take a look at four of the most common models.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news since, oh, say, 2020, then you’ll no doubt be aware that public health policy can often create tension. Having policies that affect public health can, and does, save lives, but not all policies affecting our health are “health policies.” Don’t worry, we’re going to break it all down in this episode of Crash Course Public Health, where we will discuss how an orthopedic surgeon’s love of racing helped create seatbelt policies in the US, and why sometimes laws governing what can be built where affect our health.

Disease doesn’t care about national borders. The pathogen hopping the red eye from Berlin to Boston doesn’t need a passport. So, in order to be proactive about protecting our health, we need to think globally. In this episode of Crash Course Public Health, we’re traveling around the world to look struggles and triumphs of public health on a global scale.

We don’t know what the next big scientific breakthrough is going to be or what futuristic diseases we’ll encounter. But when it comes to our health, we actually have a pretty good idea of what could be next. And we also have some ideas about what we need to do today to prepare. In this final episode of Crash Course Public Health, we’re going to take a look into the future with some roadmaps from the present.