We often think of health as a trip to the doctor or a prescription to treat or prevent diseases. Or maybe it's an operation to fix something that's gone wrong.
But a new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health reveals that Americans perceive health as being affected by a broad range of social and cultural factors.
Much of our series, What Shapes Health, explores how doctors and other health professionals pay little attention to early childhood experiences as a fundamental cause of health problems. We look at efforts to change this.
Our poll also found that Americans don't see just one factor as the most important cause of individuals' health problems.
When people rated the importance of 14 possible causes of ill health, five factors jumped to the top: lack of access to high-quality medical care; personal behavior; viruses or bacteria; high stress; and being exposed to pollution. It's a question never before asked in a poll like this.
[For more of this story, written by Joe Neel, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...shape-peoples-health]
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