Social Impact: Connecting Individual Health and Public Health: Bringing Together the Science and Practice of Social Work, Public Health, and Medicine to Tackle Pressing Health Problems

Cascades of biomedical discoveries in recent years promise to transform the way we think about our individual and collective health needs. Yet despite this progress, the national health care landscape is clouded. In addition to universally feared afflictions such as cancer and neurodegenerative disease, obesity is epidemic. Twenty-one million people in the United States suffer from diabetes and its complications such as heart disease and stroke. Other concerns range from the high incidence of cigarette smoking among teens to widespread anxiety and depression among adults and youth