Abstract
Debate on the paper by Naomar de Almeida Filho
Highlights
Resumo Com o objetivo de avaliar preliminarmente as condições de possibilidade de uma Teoria Geral da Saúde, explora-se duas das mais importantes dimensões estruturantes do campo científico da saúde: a dimensão sócio-antropológica e a dimensão epistemológica
In order to conduct a preliminary assessment of the conditions allowing for a General Theory of Health, I propose to explore two important underlying dimensions in the scientific field of health: the socio-anthropological dimension and the epistemological dimension
The English language, the matrix for this specific literature, makes subtle distinctions in meaning between the various concepts of disease and related terms, through two semantic series: disease-disorder-illness-sickness-malady and impairment-disability-handicap. These two series refer to a particular technical glossary, which due to its growing importance in contemporary scientific discourse deserves some attention in the sense of establishing a terminological equivalence in Portuguese, as indispensable background for participation by Brazilian researchers in this debate
Summary
In the field of social sciences applied to health, since World War II there has been a somewhat insistent search to objectively define the concept of disease and its correlates (Humber & Almeder, 1997), with a view towards formulating “social theories of health”. Despite the clear functionalist inspiration (along the Durkheim-Parsons lineage), there is no special position in Boorse’s original proposal for the term sickness, while illness constitutes a mere subset in the order of diseases, namely those that produce psychological and social consequences for the individual Boorse subsequently stated his intent (1977) “to offer a value-free analysis” as the basis for a theoretical concept of Health, along the same lines as the biological concepts of life and death (amongst us Brazilians, the pioneering work of Mário Chaves (1972) had already conceptualized health as an organism’s capacity to function within an ecosystem resulting from the Eros-Thanatos opposition, in line of thought intriguingly similar to Boorse’s proposal). Illness is prior to sickness, which is produced on the basis of a technical reconstruction of professional discourse in the physician-patient encounter, through communication around the culturally
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