Vasco Uribe, Alberto. Salud, medicina y clases sociales. [Health, medicine, and social classes]. Medellín, Colombia: Editorial La Pulga. 1975. p. 208

Objectives:To question the positivist perspective of traditional approaches in analyzing medicine and health.

Methodology: Analytical and interpretive.

Results:The author questions the non-historical conception and empiricist methodology used in dominant traditions to analyze health-disease phenomena. He critically analyzes medical discourse and practice in society. The author studies these phenomena by treating health and medicine as a social reality with structural and dynamic components.

In demystifying the role of physician and the traditional discourse of medicine, the author describes a relationship between physicians and economically dominant interest groups. The existence of national health services cannot be explained as an advance of some countries over others. National health services instead depend on: national constitutions, the hegemony of a specific class, level of industrialization, and linkages with other dominant countries. Predominance of curative over preventive interventions, over-specialization, concentration of resources in certain regions, and the non-critical application of technologies without scientific proof about their efficacy emerge in the logic of the global social system rather than be viewed as errors in current knowledge or its application.

Conclusions: Vasco Uribe conducts a critique of an ideological focus that omits historical and structural analytical categories in medicine and medical practice. Such categories do not account for complex causal relationships in health-disease processes and in the responses that a society offers during a specific historical moment. A reductionist focus does not permit us to understand the systems contradictions and encourages ineffective social responses to concrete public health problems.