Latin American Social Medicine

Abstract

Latin American social medicine remains little known in the English-speaking world. Social medicine groups have emerged in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, and other countries of Latin America. These groups have focused on the social determinants of illness and early death, the effects of social policies such as privatization and public sector cutbacks, occupational and environmental causes of illness, critical epidemiology, mental health effects of political trauma, the impact of gender, and collaborations with local communities, labor organizations, and indigenous peoples. The conceptual orientation and research efforts of these groups have tended to challenge current relations of economic and political power. Despite dangers linked to dictatorships and political repression, Latin American social medicine has emerged as a productive field of work, whose findings have become pertinent throughout the world.