Introduction:

The study of social representations was undertaken to explore the conceptions that musicians have about health, illness and care, and the way they relate such aspects to their musical practice.

Objective:

To understand the social representations of health, illness and cultural care of traditional musicians.

Methods:

Descriptive, qualitative study, based on the ethnographic method, which combined non-participant observation with a semi-structured interview conducted on 15 traditional musicians in the city of Santa Marta, Colombia, during the years 2015 and 2016.

Results:

The social representations of traditional musicians allow to generate an approach to how they think about their health in relation to the musical practice and their context. The awareness that musicians have of it revealed that elements such as night work, consumption of psychoactive substances and situations derived from the musical performance generate disorder to their health. They were found to develop care strategies associated to a preventive and curative attitude based on traditional methods.

Conclusions:

Social representations constitute a basic resource to understand the relationship between cultural dynamics and health-disease processes. The contrast with the available scientific literature revealed that, despite constituting different modalities and contexts, there is the possibility of finding similar alterations that may affect the health of these people.

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