Making social sciences foundational to academic medicine

Despite longstanding evidence of the enormous impact of socioeconomic conditions on population health, social sciences remain marginal to academic medicine. In this Perspective, we propose the integration of social sciences into the three pillars of academic medicine-education, research, and clinical practice-to build the theoretical and methodological foundations for identifying the mechanisms through which social and community factors shape health and disease, and to advance sustainable community engagement in the creation of medical knowledge.