Medicina popular e desenvolvimento regional: registros e reflexões a partir da Princesa do Trombetas

Abstract

The development policies carried out in the Amazon in the last decades have interfered in the biodiversity, in the way of life of the populations and in the popular cultures in health. Findings indicate that this knowledge is still present nowadays, but it is necessary to know how it is maintained before the economic model excluding and averse to cultural care. The aim of the study is to maintain popular medicine through resistance, practical transformations and social tensions. In this sense the design of the study was guided by the method of qualitative explanatory research by case study, through problematic issues involving popular medicine, public policies and capital interventions in traditional health spaces and trades. The study site was the city of Oriximiná, located in the State of Pará, Brazil. The methodology was based on a multiple case study, executed through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and anthropologically based photographic record. Municipal managers, health managers, health technicians, legal representatives, managers of public and private organizations, professionals in the folk medicine profession, historians and traditional leaders participated in the study. As a geographic area of coverage, surveys were carried out in the entire urban area, community of Boa Vista and surroundings, region of low Trombetas, CASAI and Polo Indígena de Oriximiná and Basic Health Units of the urban region. Considering these facts, the orientation of the study was interdisciplinary, encompassing the theoretical foundations underlying the method of interpretation and analysis by dialectical historical materialism, so the choice of basic theories reveals the antagonism of class struggles, cultural diversity and the implications for culture within the critical analysis of development. After evaluating the data, the content was organized into thematic categories and the analyzes pointed out that popular medicine presents new arrangements in response to the demands of regional development, resulting from development policies in the Amazon, reorganization of health systems after sanitary reform, new public policies which seek to represent the cultural diversities and infrastructure deficits of health services in rural communities, as well as the interferences of the mining enterprise.