Were health professionals to take to heart information about social determinants, Canadian health expert Dennis Raphael mockingly suggests, they would stop issuing injunctions such as “Stop smoking,” dispensing instead “Don’t be poor” and related prescriptions: “Don’t live in damp, low-quality housing”; “Don’t work in a stressful, low-paying manual job”; “Don’t live next to a busy major road or near a polluting factory”; “Be able to afford to go on a foreign holiday and sunbathe.”[25] In other words, immigrate to a kinder, saner, more equitable parallel universe.
