Four social theories for global health

Arthur Kleinman
Harvard University, Department of Anthropology, Cambridge, MA, USA
The Lancet, Volume 375, Issue 9725, Pages 1518 - 1519, 1 May 2010
URL: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)60646-0/fulltext

‘……………Global health, many would agree, is more a bunch of problems than a discipline. As such it lacks theories that can generalise findings—through an iterative process of knowledge construction, empirical testing, critique, new generalisation, and so on—into durable intellectual frameworks that can be applied not only to distinctive health problems, but to different contexts and future scenarios.
This lack may or may not have slowed progress in developing and implementing programmes, but it surely has limited the education of practitioners and the emergence of an intellectually robust field.
There is no contradiction between global health being both evidence-based and theory-oriented. After all, this is what characterises the social sciences and natural sciences, which together create the academic platform for global health, even if the profession of medicine, another core component, has not been a theory-rich field…..”