Working in Twilight Zones: Some Reflections on the Conceptual and Methodological Issues of Inter-Disciplinary Approach in Public Health

In recent years, there is a proliferation of studies on public health with an interdisciplinary orientation and in many cases the current public health professionals need to transcend the disciplines or areas they are equipped to handle. We feel that this is indeed a paradigmatic predicament for people who belong to some specific disciplines. This paper is a review work which uses the iterative approach to reformulate, revise and report conceptual and methodological levels involved while working in an inter-disciplinary platform and in an academic domain. It is now well-accepted that given the biological, medical, behavioural, cultural, institutional, sociological, economic, historical and political facets of health, an inter-disciplinary framework is desirable in public health in order to make meaningful contributions. We need to address three levels in this process. The first level is to consider health (ill-health to be specific) as a problem which has to be resolved. The second level is to consider health as a need to alleviate the suffering due to health problems. At the third level is the international domain where the focus has to be on the imbalances in the world system which sustains poverty and inequality in individual countries. With respect to specific phenomenon in health, there are a number of factors which are related to conceptual, operational, technical-methodological and institutional domains. This complexity is discussed in this paper by taking the case of decentralization in health care. It is concluded that public health needs this tradition in order to strengthen its application and utility to make health services more meaningful to the people.