Complementary and Alternative Medicines in Brazil: a series of issues

Complementary and Alternative Medicines in Brazil: a series of issuesWe thank each and every one of the discus-sants for their careful readings and provocativecomments on our article. Some of the ques-tions could be discussed immediately based onpast research, while others merely call for gen-eral remarks. Still, the purpose of this reply isnot to respond to every one of them, but todelve into those that we consider central to thecurrent debates in the field of health.Assuming deduction as the analytical per-spective, we begin with a more general reactionto Paulo Cesar Alves, recalling that in the con-ceptual matrix of social sciences in Brazil, thetheme of Complementary and Alternative Med-icines (CAM) has been present for severaldecades, although viewed differently. This is-sue is crucial for understanding the construc-tion of social sciences applied to health, i.e.,the social sciences in the field of disputes inhealth, since this understanding ensures roomfor another question, namely, why has suchknowledge not been developed in a bigger wayin the field of health? The author himself pointsto an important part of the answer when heunderscores the propensity of our researchersto identify tensions and conflicts without con-sidering the daily actions they simultaneouslyinvolve in the different healthcare arenas. Webelieve that this limited development is alsodue to the lack of bridges for developing theknowledge of social sciences in other fields. Inother words, we do indeed have sufficient ele-ments to demonstrate the social determina tionson the health-disease-care process, but we stillneed to develop our skills “