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Foundations of Health Science

Office Hours — the companion podcast for the breadth course

Each episode is a relaxed walkthrough of the week's lesson — audio, summary, and full transcript on every page.

Conceptual foundations

Lessons 01 — 03

Conceptualizing Health, Illness, and DiseaseDefinitions of health from biomedical, biopsychosocial, and salutogenic perspectives; illness as lived experience versus disease as biomedical label; the medical model and its limits; key vocabulary for thinking carefully about what "healthy" actually means.

Rise of Public Health and Modern SurveillanceFrom the sanitary movement to modern surveillance: vital statistics, notifiable diseases, the W H O, P H A C, and C D C, plus how routine data systems turn raw counts into public-health action.

Infectious Disease, Sanitation, and HygieneGerm theory, chains of transmission, herd immunity, vaccination, the great sanitary engineering victories, and the unfinished business of water, sanitation, and hygiene worldwide.

Bodies, behaviors, and the life course

Lessons 04 — 08

Nutrition, Physical Activity, and SleepMacronutrients, dietary patterns, food environments, the physical-activity guidelines, sleep architecture and circadian rhythms, and the policy levers from sugar taxes to active-transport infrastructure.

Sexual and Reproductive HealthAnatomy and the reproductive life course, contraception and abortion access, S T I prevention, maternal and infant mortality, and the policy and rights frameworks that shape who gets care.

Human Development and the Life CourseSensitive periods and developmental milestones, the D O H a D hypothesis and the Dutch Hunger Winter, A C E s, life-course epidemiology, and how early conditions ripple decades forward.

Genetics, Genomics, and HealthFrom Mendel to G W A S and polygenic risk scores; single-gene versus complex disease; epigenetics; the history of eugenics; pharmacogenomics; and the ethics of genetic testing and editing.

Health Behaviors, Mental Health, and Social InfluenceBehavior-change theories, stress and the H P A axis, the global burden of mental disorders, addiction as chronic disease, social-network and norm-based contagion, and how individual choices nest inside social context.

Environments and determinants

Lessons 09 — 12

Environmental Health: Indoor, Built, and NaturalIndoor air quality, walkability and the built environment, climate change as a health crisis, environmental-justice mapping, and the tools epidemiologists use to link place to health.

Occupational Health and Worker SafetyWorkplace hazards and the hierarchy of controls, occupational disease history from coal mines to asbestos to silica, workers' compensation systems, gig-economy precarity, and burnout as an occupational phenomenon.

Social, Economic, and Political DeterminantsIncome gradients, the Whitehall studies, social capital, neighborhood effects, political determinants and welfare regimes, structural racism and colonization, and the case for upstream intervention.

Disability, Diversity, and Integrating FoundationsMedical versus social models of disability, the I C F framework, intersectionality, equity versus equality, inclusive research practice, and a synthesis pulling the whole breadth course into a single coherent map.