Anthropology and intercultural health: challenges of a given

Abstract

This article approaches the subject of intercultural health. For this purpose we reviewed some of the main proposals which in our milieu gave rise to actions that aimed at breaching the gap in damage to health among the indigenous population and the general public, and which stemmed from indigenism itself and —to a lesser degree— the programs that focused on expanding the coverage of ser vices. The work seeks to build a provisional proposal that may be useful to improve the quality of the health care by means of training and professionalization of the human resources working in the indigenous contexts, by providing content stemming from social anthropolog y and especially from medical anthropology.