Doença como condição social : um estudo sobre as experiências de portadores de doenças reumáticas crônicas em Porto Alegre

Abstract

This study aims to reflect on the health-disease phenomenon in the experience of patients with chronic rheumatic diseases, therefore two ethnographic qualitative researches were performed. The first one was in Outpatients Rheumatology of two teaching hospitals with the SUS service of Porto Alegre/ RS, the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) and the Hospital Santa Clara from the Complexo Hospitalar Santa Casa, linked to the Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (UFCSPA), the second one was in Grupo de Pacientes Artríticos de Porto Alegre (GRUPAL), a non-governmental organization focused on patients with rheumatic diseases. I seek to understand the experience of chronic disease from some fundamental changes in people's lives after the advent of the disease and how the experience of illness is related to the social position of the individuals, in their circle of interpersonal relationships and, more broadly, social structures, highlighting the categories of gender and class. Moreover, I highlight some assimilation processes and coping with the disease in the daily life of people in the condition of chronic disease, as well as some reconfigurations and rearrangements of the identity of the sick person from the appropriation of this new condition.