Abid bossouf

Thesis project

Today, oral health is a major public health issue at both individual and societal level. It is characterized by a multidimensional aspect, involving the biological, the psychological and the social.
Since oral health remains strongly correlated with socio-economic status, both within a country and on a global scale, oral health cannot be considered without a systemic analysis at different levels of organization, from local to global.

Oral health is therefore imminently complex. Sociologist Edgar Morin theorized complex thinking at the end of the 20th century. Opposing Cartesian thinking, this theory highlights the necessary interactions between different fields, such as mind & matter, philosophy & science, body & soul, and suggests opting for an interdisciplinary approach to study all the dimensions of the objects of study, in this case oral health.

Complex thinking underlines the importance of linking the human sciences to the biological sciences (Morin, 1980). The object of research cannot be thought of in isolation from its environment, obscuring the history, culture and society in which the individual evolves. Oral health and its study must therefore be ecodisciplinaryized, i.e. studied taking into account the contextual, cultural and social dimensions in which they are born, pose problems, sclerotize and metamorphose.

Yet medicine is still too compartmentalized, with each specialty tending to become hyperspecialized. Scientific knowledge is constantly evolving; every week, more than 20,000 new scientific articles are published in the field of health.

Nevertheless, while scientific research allows us to isolate the object in order to master it, human phenomena are complex, and "the subject speaks". Pierre Bourdieu has conceptualized the notion of habitus, which he defines as "an immanent law, deposited in each agent by early education". It's about an individual's way of being, his ethos, and his way of behaving, his hexis.

A multi-disciplinary, cross-sectoral approach is therefore essential to mastering all the factors involved, which are specific to the individual, his or her environment and the society in which he or she lives.

How can complex thinking in oral health help develop a public health strategy to prevent, treat and stabilize oral pathologies?

Under the direction of Nicolas Giraudeau