Living pharmacy

popular health practices in an agroecological settlement in inland Paraná, Brazil

Abstract

This article is characterized as a study grounded in historical-dialectical materialism, which sought to discuss the breadth of the concept of health by encompassing practices that promote collective and counter-hegemonic forms of care as resistance to the growing medicalization and pharmaceuticalization of life, intensified by the demands of capital. In seeking to understand the conception of health and its materialization in an agroecological settlement belonging to the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, analyzed through its historicity and the contradictions of the capitalist state, three interviews were conducted with women settlers, from which three categories emerged a posteriori: “Patriarchal determinations in the health-disease process”; “Conception of health, popular practices, and its materialization in the community”; “Health in perspective: the impacts of capitalism and the agroecological potential”. The study concluded that popular health practices developed in the settlement are significant as a form of resistance to the commodification of health and pathologization of life, making it essential to understand the health-disease process through the multiple determinants that complexify reality. Furthermore, despite knowledge and support of these practices, the population of the settlement studied was found to continue predominantly opting for synthetic medications.