The Navajo language is widely used by the Navajos of all ages, with over half of the Navajo people using it at home. Many Navajo still transmit their parents native language to their children as their mother tongue. Because of this the Navajo are one of the few tribes in territory that used their native language for everyday communication. However, the language is in decline, especially in urban areas outside the reserves and increasingly young people begin to use English. Even within the reserves census indicate that between 1980 and 1990 the proportion of Navajos between five and seventeen years who used only English rose from 12 to 28 . For 2000 the figure rose to 43 .
Background disciplinary relations between anthropology, medicine and medical practice can be documented from old. The natural look of Medicine, introduced by the Treaties Hipocr ticos developed a theory of causation of disease related to the environment and a methodology involving the study of clinical cases – for example in the , with methods of ethnographic nature — in the Treaty Aires, Waters and Places. The influence of the Hippocratic esceritos explains that the medicine used until the late nineteenth century, qualitative field techniques, to engage in participant observation and produce a huge volume of written ethnographic-ethnography, since it was also part of their practice. General Anthropology occupies an important position in the basic medical sciences (corresponding to the subjects commonly called today pre-clinical).As the medicine was enclosing medical education in hospital and adopted a reticent attitude against the empiricism of physicians in their daily practice between people and assumed experimental medicine at the hospital and the lab as their basic source of knowledge, ethnography doctors were leaving in abeyance. This neglect is made when adopting social anthropology ethnography as one of its hallmarks was professional and abandoning the initial draft of general anthropology. The gap between professional anthropology and medicine did not mean never, a complete split between the two. During the twentieth century are consistent interdisciplinary relations between the two disciplines to the formation of medical anthropology in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. So much so that many medical anthropologists come from the health professions (nursing, psychology, psychiatry, medicine). . Among doctors are WHRRivers, Jean Benoist, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, Cecil Helman and Arthur Kleinman, many others come from the social sciences as George Foster, William Caudill, Byron Good, Tullio Seppilli, Gilles Bibeau, Lluis Mallart, Andr s Zempleni, Gilbert Lewis, Ronald Frankenberg, Els van Dongen and Eduardo Men ndez.
