Community participation in primary health care

The medical profession lacks an analysis of society and medical care is individualistic rather than societal, curative rather than preventive. This paper, which reports on experience in the field, shows how community health should help people to reflect and discover the causes of their poverty and ill health so that they may be able to tackle effectively the issues of social injustice such as low wages and other forms of exploitation. Community health, then, becomes a way of motivating the people to mobilize themselves to resist the domination of the traditionally powerful. If this is not done, community health may remain only a social service that keeps the people dependent and not participants in the process of their own development.