Contributions of traditional midwifery to the exercise of Maternal-Perinatal care in Colombia: an intercultural vision of the phenomenon

Abstract

This article seeks to reflect on the distances and repetitive ignorance of the ancestral knowledge of midwifery and the relationship of this phenomenon with the influence of the positivist paradigm in health sciences and the undervaluation of knowledge developed by women in domestic settings. We also want to highlight some traditional practices that are applied and that should be extrapolated to the realities of the care of an institutional delivery by nurses and other professionals, which would make the concept of humanized delivery and the intercultural approach to health care be less utopian Hence, an approach to the different local forms of traditional midwifery in Colombia that account for a mapping of care practices and associated cosmologies is imperative, in order to build epistemic bridges that generate research and knowledge necessary for both parties and of course , they benefit the health of the pregnant woman and her newborn.