Los desafíos de la salud y de la modernidad para una época de transformaciones paradigmáticas

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the consequences of the hegemonic role of the global market economy along with the integrating capacity of post-industrial Western cultures over health in Latin Amencan countries. The author discusses the market limitations in terms of accessibility of health services, fiscal impotency of the public sector, demographical and epidemiological changes and the overall contemporary crisis medicine is going through. Today's debates on development and modernity leads the author to reconceptualize health in a way that transcends its economical and political components, to further include cultural, philosophical and ethical dimensions, as well as values. Hence, health appears more and more as the reflection of an “ideal society" and catapults the debate over to the social policies area of any development strategy. Finally, the work analyses the challenges that the future holds for social policies, underlying their little permiability to the political-ideological confrontation. The author questions the limitations of the answers offered through social -engineering or economic rationalization, giving special emphasis to its value as a component of modernity and development. The author intents a reflexion on health in an era of paradigm rupture, aiming to redefine pnorities in times of epistemological shifts, particular to the end of this millennium