The contribution of epidemiology to the study of diseases and their distributions in populations is undoubtless. However, many experts have pointed out the necessity to take into account the difficulties and limitations of this discipline. They call the attention to the necessity of integrating different theoretical and methodological perspectives to the study of complex objects like the health-disease relationship. The limits of the risk factors approach, when isolated applied to the study of such relationship, must be surpassed by means of models able to address the relationship among human subjects and their cultural and socio-historical environment. The meeting of the epidemiological method, which is fully adequate for generalization, with another method, able to deepening, can be reached by means of the ethnoepidemiological strategy. This strategy assumes that health-disease phenomena are social processes which must be taken as such: historical, complex, phragmented, conflictive, dependent, ambiguous and uncertain. This essay aims to analyze some theoretical and methodological aspects which may allow a reflection about ethnoepidemiology potentialities, as an approach which integrates epidemiology to other disciplines.
Ethnoepidemiology; Epidemiologic theory; Epidemiology limits; Discipline integration