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If this were not enough, health problems have become more severe and widespread due to globalization (e.g. with the alteration of food supplies or migrants facing a range of aggressions in the host countries) (Castañeda 2019; Horton 2016; Perro and Adams 2017) global warming (with higher rates of heat stroke and other heat-related problems) (Baer and Singer 2018, Singer 2019 ), and environmental restructuring and degradation (with more pollutants and chemicals in the air, soil, water, and everyday use items), all of which interface with each other to effect syndemics (Singer 2009a), ecosyndemics (Singer 2009b), and ecocrises interactions (Baer and Singer 2018; Singer 2009c, 2010, 2019, 2021). Indeed, at least in the United States, life expectancy is declining and, at the same time, a myriad of mental health problems, metabolic and immune conditions, drug overdose, and gun violence are reaching “epidemic” proportions and affecting younger and younger generations (Perro and Adams 2017). We are in a situation in which health improvements and innovations coexist with longstanding inequalities and even worsening health indicators. The ever increasing costs of care given the for-profit characteristics of the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and health delivery industries continue with minimal national or global regulations (Sunder Rajan 2017). The push for insurance-based privatization policies has been globally enforced in the Sustainable Development Goals as “Universal Health Coverage” (Abadía-Barrero and Bugbee 2019). As health care financing and metrics take over health decisions (Adams 2016; Metzl and Kirkland 2010; Mol 2008; Mulligan 2014), the most fundamental health care interventions, such as child and maternal health or immunizations, continue to receive funding and health technologies in the form of vertical programs, adding to the historical disregard of comprehensive primary health care and inter-sectorial approaches. Within this scenario, medical anthropologists are effectively conducting research that bridges the local with the global to ask questions such as why certain indicators and not others count in global health? whose agenda is considered more important behind national and global decisions? what sets of problems, contradictions, and obfuscations are evident as people are funded to improve certain indicators but are required to disregard other health frameworks that they might deem as important? how are power, bureaucracy, technologies and health delivery interconnected and how these shape the experiences of patients and health care personnel? how are diseases shaped and changed historically, biologically, politically and socioculturally? By asking such questions, medical anthropology’s biocultural approach opens dialogues and debates with public policy, clinical medicine, political economy, public health, and health care systems and management, among other fields of research and intervention.

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