Introduction:

Functionalism as an approach to public health has not gone beyond its historical crisis regarding the solution of problems in caring for disease or producing health among individuals and collectivities. This is because its epistemological basis is restrictive and current resources in health systems neither guarantee health nor improve the quality of life for the collectivity.

Development:

At the same time, Latin American Social Medicine and Public Health have expanded this horizon by debating the epistemological sense of health as a complex disciplinary field where knowledge and practices are approached from different paradigms and epistemic perspectives.

Conclusions:

Social Medicine and Public Health (SM/PH) resignify our understanding of the health-disease process by incorporating additional processes. Through conceptual approaches, this article interrogates the SM/PH approach to three processes: An epistemological consideration of health; the relationship between the social sciences and health; and criticisms of the preventive model and conventional epidemiology. These aspects validate SM/PH's contribution to interpreting the health-decease process in difficult scenarios stemming from the commodification of health and the crisis of the State.

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