Author’s Night: “WELL: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health” – Dr. Sandro Galea

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Despite spending more on health than any other nation in the world, Americans today live shorter, less healthy lives than citizens of other rich countries. Why? Because, as Sandro Galea explains in WELL: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health (Oxford – May 2019), Americans focus far too much on insurance plans, medicine, and doctors at the expense of the fundamental forces that often determine the difference between healthy and unhealthy—factors like power, money, where we live, and politics.

Our national understanding of what constitutes “being well” is centered on the lifestyles we adopt to stay healthy, and the insurance plans and prescriptions we fall back on when we’re not. And while all these things are important, they haven’t proven to make the difference between healthy and unhealthy on the large scale. In WELL, Dr. Galea, a physician and Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, offers a radical call to reexamine the way we talk about health. He argues that our health is defined by the full spectrum of our life circumstances, from the families we come from to the neighborhoods we live in and the level of education we attain. Until we fully understand these forces, and bring them to the forefront of our conversation, our national health is never going to improve.

“A deeply affecting work from one of the important and innovative voices in American health and medicine.”—Arianna Huffington
“For 45 years I have fought for equity, compassion, and inclusion in mental health, so I am thrilled to see Sandro Galea’s Well take the revolutionary and compelling stance that these principles can have a more beneficial effect upon public health than any scientific discovery.” – Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady
“The passionate argument we need for the health we deserve. What an important frame for the right to health!” –Leana Wen, President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America
“A sensitive and nuanced perspective on often overlooked issues—compassion, fairness, freedom—that matter most to our health.” –David Blumenthal, President, The Commonwealth Fund
“A brilliant exposé of the societal factors that profoundly impact individual and population health.” –Georges C. Benjamin, Executive Director, American Public Health Association
“Galea moves beyond a numbing rhetoric of numbers to tell how societal forces mold people’s health.” –Mary Bassett, Harvard University, former New York City Health Commissioner