What is social medicine?
The fundamental idea of Social Medicine is that the structure of society, in interaction with culture and the actions of social actors, influences who will be healthy and who will get sick and ill, or die, how when and from what.
Societies have patterns of illness, according to their living conditions and often divergent conceptions of what constitutes health. How we go about caring for human suffering responds to culture as well as social and biological imperatives. In short, the biological human existence is inextricably a social matter.
The distinctive role of Latin American Social Medicine has been both, an active participation on the political arena defending health as a human right and creating a critical and autonomous thought.
Social Medicine studies populations as collective groups and not simply as an assortment of isolated individuals. It is, therefore, focused on health and sickness of social groups that live and work in specific ways, not on clinical diseases.
Social Medicine examines the internal logic and social roles of health institutions. Health care institutions have had the capacity of reinforcing the existing social relations of domination, they can also develop alternatives to those relations.
Social Medicine looks at health and disease in a recursive manner. Health and health care do not exist in isolation, they are part of a historical process.
Social Medicine emphasizes that cultural, social, and historical processes are the “material base” from which the “symbolic order” is built and that health and health care and actions for both, individuals and social groups are part of both.
Human praxis, which includes the interweaving between material base and symbolic order and political activism, allows for approaches to health that do not merely describe reality, but also promote social justice and equity, defending health as a human right.
In many ways we work as a traditional academic journal, following the codes of the IJCE, using a system of rigorous peer review and focusing on scientific papers. However, there are important differences: we do not accept advertising nor funding from drug companies.
Social Medicine seeks to develop a methodology that enriches both quantitative and qualitative approaches with historical and cultural perspectives that consider collective actions to overcome the limitations of the reductionist perspectives of the positivistic view of clinical medicine and public health.
Social Medicine has a rich historic legacy. The current debates on health inequalities and the promoting of equity have been significant contributions of social medicine.
Social Medicine assumes that any discussion regarding health today is inevitably an international and political issue.
