Sabers i pràctiques profanes en un servei d'urgències de Catalunya: una perspectiva antropològica

Identifier:  TDX:3356

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX3356

Authors:  Prat Caballol, Rita

Abstract:
In the last decades the demand for health services is increasing continuously, as do the claims to increase their resources; also, technologies are presented to us as possible resolutions for everything. In this context, the objective of this thesis is to construct an ethnography of the biomedical health system, identifying people’s perceptions and narratives about health and disease, the causalities that relate both concepts and the practices that are implemented, while also analysing the power relations within the health system. The research has been carried out mainly in a Catalan emergency unit and methods of qualitative research –interviews, questionnaires and participant observation– have been used, with the support of statistical analysis, opting for an interpretive hermeneutic analysis. Results: emotions and feelings occupy a prominent place in the story about health and disease, and the more holistic view of the body clashes with the biomedical paradigm; although they are socially-constructed values, in turn they present an intrinsic part of individuality in continuous transformation. In fact, there does not exist a general idea shared by everyone. Regarding causalities, those of the biomedical, anthropological and mystical/religious/cosmological fields are recognized. The biomedical system occupies the centrality in practices and care, but since it does not always provide solutions and has an imposing and overseeing nature, it tends to create resistances. On the other side, it also creates addictions: the system is used for satisfying created needs as well as just another form of consumption. It is a system intrinsically rooted in capitalism, dominated by hierarchical, power and paternalistic relationships that induce ignorance and submission, where fear and insecurity prevail. Despite its hegemony, biomedicine has not totally won people over, given that syncretism and explanatory distances continue to exist between profane and biomedical knowledge.