Applied medical anthropology in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil, collaboration between anthropology and medicine, was initially concerned with the deployment of community health programs in ethnic and cultural minorities and the institutions and ethnographic evaluation cualitativas.de health hospitals and mental hospitals and primary care services. In the first case was to solve the problems of establishing the supply of services in a complex mosaic of ethnic groups in the second, the analysis of conflicts within institutions interestamentales: especially among physicians, nurses, support staff and government personnel who had side effects on your administrative reorganization and institutional goals. The ethnographic reports show that interclass crises have a direct impact on therapeutic criteria and care for the sick.They also provided new methodological criteria to assess new institutions resulting from the welfare reforms and experiments as therapeutic communities. The ethnographic evidence supported criticisms of institutional custodialism and contributed decisively to the policies of deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care and social development in general. In some countries, like Italy, a rethink of the guidelines on education and health promotion.The empirical answers to these questions led to incorporation of anthropologists in community health programs and internationally in developing countries, the evaluation of the influence of social and cultural variables in the epidemiology of certain forms of psychiatric pathology (transcultural psychiatry), in studies of cultural resistance to innovation in therapeutic and care, in studying traditional healers, traditional healers and birth attendants (TBAs) may be reinvented as health workers (so-called barefoot doctors since the sixties also in countries developer, biomedicine is facing a number of issues requiring review misnamed factors predisposing social or cultural variables reduced to mere quantitative protocols and subject to causal interpretations of biological or genetic.These should be highlighted: a) the transitioning between a pervasive pattern of acute infectious disease with a pattern of pathology based on chronic degenerative diseases without a specific etiological therapy. b) The emergence of the need to develop mechanisms and strategies for long term care, therapeutic interventions against incisive. c) The influence of concepts such as quality of life in relation to the classic biomedical therapeutic criteria. Hence the problems associated with the deployment of community health mechanisms evolved since the first phase they are perceived as tools to combat inequalities in access to health services to a new situation in which an offer once deployed integral to the emerging population problems arising from ethnic, cultural, religious, age groups, gender or social class.If the former is associated with the deployment of community care devices, another effect arises occurs when the dismantling of the same with the return to particular responsibility in this regard. In all these areas of qualitative ethnographic research and local level are essential to understanding the way patients and their social networks incorporate knowledge about health and illness in a context in which their experience is colored by cultural influences derived complex characteristics social relations in advanced societies and the weight of social media, especially in the audiovisual and advertising.