Medicine's use and circulation in an urban popular neighborhood in Ceilândia, DF

Abstract

In the suburbs of Brasilia, family health is taken care of in particular by elderly women. They know the official and non-official shortcuts inside the health system, medicines that each of the family members should take and the places where medicines can be bought cheaper or received for free. They also make experiments with pills and capsules - each ones are strong or dangerous, which ones have to be substituted or combined with different drugs, etc. This paper aims to discuss how informal networks sharing pharmaceutical knowledge and local forms of communication between family members, neighbors and health professionals determine a wider, more complex understanding of health. It is based on an ethnographic research with older residents of Guariroba district in Ceilândia, DF, which are in familiar terms with hypertension and diabetes mellitus. Some of the data that support the discussion are the life stories of these migrants towards the Federal District (Brasilia region, in Brasil); the consumption of drugs as a generator of bodily and social experiences of falling ill; self-medication as a practice even after having been seen at the local health agents. This paper wants to emphasize that technical opinion and products offered by official agents of health care did not prevent interviewed women of resorting regularly to a much wider and creative network, neither replaced it. It wants also to show that to perfection this network is a public demonstration of involvement and commitment of these caregivers with their patients' recovery or stability.