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ABSTRACT: In the last 30 years, Mexico has faced major crises in its political, economic, and social life. These crises have affected living conditions and health. With the implementation in the 1980's of structural adjustment and economic stabilization policies, Mexico saw a rapid growth of poverty accelerating trends toward social polarization and social division. The current crisis, fueled by deregulation of the global financial markets, only deepens the tendency towards economic stagnation. It has led to an increase in unemployment, worsening income inequalities, and generalized inflation. The increase in food prices, in particular, has made life more difficult for the Mexican population. The crisis has had a palpable and concrete impact on living conditions, health status, and food security for diverse social groups.
Social Medicine. 01/2010;
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ABSTRACT: Introduction The recent discussion of the social determinants of health, which has been promoted by the WHO as a way to approach global health conditions is neither a new nor a foreign subject for Latin American social medicine or collective health. Indeed, this approach to health derives from the principles of 19th century European social medicine which accepted that the health of the population is a matter of social concern, that social and economic conditions have an important bearing on health and disease, and that these relationships should be subjected to scientific enquiry. (Rosen, 1985:81) The specific socio-historical conditions of Latin America in the 1970’s fostered the development of an innovative, critical, and socially-based based health analysis, which was seen in an evolving theoretical approach with deep social roots. (Cohn, 2003) This analysis calls for scientific work which is committed to changing living and working conditions and to improving the health of the popular classes. (Waitzkin y col. 2001; Iriart y col. 2002). From its beginning, this school of socio-medical thought recognized that collective health has two main areas of research: 1) the distribution and determinants of health and disease and 2) the interpretation, technical knowledge, and specialized practices concerning health, disease, and death. The goal is to understand health and disease as differentiated moments in the human lifecycle, subject to permanent change, and expressing the biological nature of the human body under specific forms of social organization, all this in such a way as to allow discussion of causality and determination. (Breilh y Granda,1982; Laurell, 1982). Latin American social medicine criticized biomedical and conventional epidemiological approaches for isolating health and disease from social context, misinterpreting social processes as biological, conceptualizing health phenomena in individualistic terms, and adopting the methodological procedures of the natural sciences
Social Medicine. 01/2008;
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ABSTRACT: The paper deals with the history of Latin America and the development of sociology and social medicine thought it. It makes a balance of the emergence and contributions of this innovative thinking.
Social Medicine. 01/2006;
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ABSTRACT: En los últimos 17 años, la política de salud en México ha transitado de una concepción de atención integral y de extensión gradual de coberturas como responsabilidad del Estado, a través de las instituciones públicas de salud, a una activa promoción gubernamental de la mercantilización de servicios, complementada con una política de beneficencia hacia la población pobre. En esta transformación se identifican tres periodos que se corresponden con los sexenios presidenciales y que expresan tres momentos distintos de la reforma del sector salud: el primero (1982-1988) caracterizado como transicional, el segundo (1988-1994), en donde emerge con claridad la estrategia bipolar de mercantilización y beneficencia y el tercero (1994-2000), en donde las estrategias gubernamentales se orientan a fortalecer los mercados de la salud. Esta reestructuración del sector salud ha sido instrumentada en forma explícita desde 1982 y forma parte del conjunto de reformas secundarias derivadas de la adecuación subordinada del campo social a las políticas de ajuste estructural y a los megaproyectos económicos y sociales impuestos por los organismos financieros internacionales.
Cadernos de Saúde Pública. 01/2001;
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ABSTRACT: Incluye bibliografía Trabajo que examina la política de salud en México, señalando la contradicción de dos vertientes: una que propone eficiencia, calidad, equidad y derecho universal a la salud; la otra, el viraje neoliberal que propicia formas de servición más rentables, o costeadas por los usuarios, recorte del gasto, escacez , privatización y regulación a través del mercado.
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Salud colectiva, ISSN 1669-2381, Vol. 4, Nº. 3, 2008, pags. 319-333.
