People living in rural areas of America experience place-based challenges and barriers exacerbated by social conditions and systems of oppression. According to the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and Human Services (2024) more than 14% of Americans living in a rural area have a disability. Furthermore, rurality creates complex barriers to giving and receiving quality care which often emphasize what disability scholars call our interdependence. The field of public health is often in the position of power to create policy, revise systems, and support communities. However, public health, as a field and rhetoric, has historically decentered, devalued and endangered individuals with disabilities. Although the field of public health is evolving, it has a legacy of contributing to the eugenics of disabled individuals (e.g. preventing disability). Recent developments in the field consider disability as either a marginalized social class, and/or as a multiple determinant of health. Even so, this contemporary perspective often lacks the depth, breadth, and respect people with disabilities and disability scholars could apply to the same issues. This project aims to understand the implications of applying a disability lens to public health. It accomplishes this through identifying contemporary value alignments and misalignments between the two fields by specifically exploring caregiving and the American rural context. Then guided by models from each field (e.g. socio ecological model, 10 principles of disability justice), it attempts to provide a case study of how the field of public health might apply practices that are informed by values better aligned with a critical disability and/or disability justice lens.