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On a population health level, multidisciplinary teams have also used cultural–ecological models to address risks, and potential prevention activities associated with environmental contaminants. There is considerable interest, and resources available, to identify and mitigate health disparities in underserved populations, and there are a growing number of trans-disciplinary protocols to achieve that goal. (Trotter et al. 2019).

One of the most obvious and most practical midrange theories in medical anthropology is the theory of cultural relativity. It is also one of the most miss-applied and politically misused theories in anthropology. This theory is an expression of the empirical findings of anthropologists and other social scientists that groups tend to share consensual world views within the group, and differentiate those world views from others outside the group. Finding examples, from folk medicine to health care prevention programs, is easy, but the findings also frequently result in highly complex actions and recommendations (from calls for cultural competency, to representations that only members of the same culture, or social strata, or language group, or gender, or lifestyle orientation, etc. can understand X culture and therefore can be sufficiently culturally competent to deal with the health and medically related problems of that culture). These forms of cultural particularism tend to reinforce difference at the expense of the possibility for cross-cultural understanding and action. At the same time, the “one size fits all” universalism found in some health interventions is based on a view that constantly stumbles over social and cultural difference, to the detriment of understanding the actual confluence of culture, health, healing and medicine in peoples everyday lives.