Abstract
France is characterized by a good overall health status and high social inequalities in the health sector. The renewed interest in health inequalities is the opportunity to question a unique definition focused on results at the expense of processes, in a country where policies on tackling inequalities are based on the health care system. General practice has a particular position in this system, as a new academic speciality, which still needs to figure out how to define itself. It is described simultaneously as a heath care system gatekeeper, a public health officer or an advocate for inter-individual relationship and holistic care. While medicine is based on scientific evidence, it is also a prudential profession as it considers singular situations, generating uncertainty in practice. Among singular sources, social characteristics of both patients and doctors have to be considered. However, in their practice, physicians experience a diversity of social. Sometimes a barrier to the professional activity and considered external to the medical world, sometimes considered as part of scientific evidences by epidemiology, it could also be considered as a component of the individual construction of the patient on which the physician can rely, with the potential to lead to a moralization of behaviours and identities. The physician's social characteristics are often omitted, as if doctors were neutral or mere representatives of science. It is however in the interaction between these two worlds that social determinants of health inequalities can be found, and it seems that a physician could only provide good care to patients sharing the same similarities.