Joel

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ARTIGO ARTICLE

Educação em saúde: conhecimentos, representações sociais e experiências da doença Health education: knowledge, social representation, and illness

Maria Flávia Gazzinelli 1 Andréa Gazzinelli 1 Dener Carlos dos Reis 1 Cláudia Maria de Mattos Penna

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Abstract
1 Escola de Enfermagem, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brasil. Correspondência M. F. Gazzinelli Escola de Enfermagem, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Av. Alfredo Balena 190, Belo Horizonte, MG 30130-100, Brasil. [e-mail]

This article discusses the theory and practice of health and education, beginning with the no tion of the hegemony (in health education practice) of strategies linked to the notion that to grasp established knowledge always leads to the acquisition of new behaviors and practices. Five different axioms have oriented education and health practices, either juxtaposed or at different moments: (1) the notion of overcoming the determination of knowledge over practices; (2) the determination of representations over practices; (3) the analysis of representations within the traditional framework of right and wrong; (4) reciprocity between representations and practices; and (5) the importance of considering practices amenable to re-elaboration through representations, thus situating experience in understanding subjects’ illness processes, as well as the way subjects culturally construct illness. The article highlights the need for a link between social representations and illness-as-experience in health education practices. Health Education; Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; Behavior

Ao se fazer um exame crítico abrangente da Educação em Saúde, durante as últimas décadas, detecta-se um desenvolvimento surpreendente e uma reorientação crescente das reflexões teóricas e metodológicas neste campo de estudo. Ressalta-se aí a contribuição dos estudos de Antropologia da Saúde e das Ciências Sociais contemporâneos 1. Observa-se,