New contours of global inequality present new challenges for global health, and require that we consider new kinds of health issues as global. I provide a number of illustrations, arguing the need for a political science of health that goes beyond conventional preoccupations with formal institutional and interstate interactions and takes into account how globalization has affected the health po...

The recent perspective article “How Neoliberalism Is Shaping the Supply of Unhealthy Commodities and What This Means for NCD Prevention,” by Lencucha and Throw, interrogates how the dominant neoliberal paradigm restricts meaningful policy action to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs). It contributes an NCD perspective to the existing literature on neoliberalism and...

in this paper we emphasize the importance of questioning the global validity of significant concepts underpinning global health policy. this implies questioning the concept of global health as such and accepting that there is no global definition of the global. further, we draw attention to ‘quality’ and ‘empowerment’ as examples of world-forming concepts. these concepts are exemplary for the g...

Brugha and Bruen (2014) raise a number of compelling issues related to the interaction between politics and policy in the global health context. The first question that their views invite is whether this is, at heart, best characterized as a benign or malign influence. Many commentators have suggested that this overlap should be discouraged (see, for example, Marseille et al 2002; Thomas & Webe...

BACKGROUND The evidence on the association between politics and health is scarce considering the importance of this topic for population health. Studies that investigated the effect of different political regimes on health outcomes show inconsistent results. METHODS Bayesian time-series cross-section analyses are used to examine the overall impact of regional politics on variations in Italian...

Doctors know government and politics like lawyers know medicine—enough to really make a mess of things. Thus, physicians loath to recommend major surgery (especially of debatable benefit) for their patients, eagerly advocate for radical “reform” of our health care system, even though the body politic also bears lifelong scars after disfiguring interventions. Why do doctors, so distrustful of th...

Global health appears to be undergoing a gradual shift in focus away from diseases towards systems. This is partly a response to the difficulties that disease-specific global health initiatives have experienced in meeting individual programme targets and internationally agreed benchmarks, in spite of significant increases in development assistance over the past decade. 1 It is also a response t...

Actors working in global health often portray it as an enterprise grounded in principled concerns, advanced by individuals and organizations who draw on scientific evidence to pursue health equity. This portrait is incomplete. It is also a field of power relations—a social arena in which actors claim and draw on expertise and moral authority to gain influence and pursue career, organizational a...

there is a growing global market in healthcare and patients. and while there is a small body of evidence emerging around this phenomenon commonly known as medical tourism there remain significant unanswered policy and research questions which need to be addressed. we outline some of the key issues set against the six key disciplinary preoccupations of the journal: epidemiology, health economics...