Current and future issues for medical social scientists in less developed countries

This paper deals with ‘medical social engineering’, which is now required to solve health problems in developing countries. The first section presents an historical background for social scientists participation in the health field and explores their involvement in classical public health approaches, such as direct interventions, epidemiology and ecology. In a second section, more recent types of participation, associated with the health political model, are discussed in reference to community medicine, ethnomedicine and clinics. The third section examines three promising recent developments in medical social science: health planning and evaluation, population studies and emergence of an indigenous social science. Finally, an interface is proposed between social and bio-medical sciences, and a reconceptualization of health and disease is explored which fills the gaps between these sciences.