SciTech Medical and Envirnoment

“Need to involve anthropologists in making health policy”

• Anthropologists have not received due recognition in the eyes of those who control health care delivery systems in India

  • The field of Health Ecology as a specialty of Anthropology was developed in 1930s
• The participants underscored the need to establish the centrality of Anthropology as a discipline in studying ecology and health in a holistic perspective and “to insist on the necessity to involve anthropologists in policy-making”.
• “Two key concepts from the ecological model -- that health and disease are ultimately due to a chain of factors, and that they are part of a set of interacting sub-systems -- within the broader global perspective of critical medical anthropology are used to describe and explain the dynamics of the AIDS pandemic,” the speakers said, adding that Anthropology has provided unique models to explain the prevalence of health and disease within the overall domain of ecology and health.