Rastros terapêuticos : técnicas da equoterapia e a (des) medicalização da vida.

Abstract

Medicalization is a practice that consists of translating certain behaviors, conditions and phenomena of life into biomedical languages and interventions. In this way, it has been increasingly contested and resignified by beneficiary agents and health providers since the second half of the 20th century. At the same time, the so-called alternative medicines or complementary and traditional therapies (WHO, 2019) proliferated in the modernist world, becoming part of a framework of innovations and medical alternatives with demedicalizing perspectives. Based on the ethnographic investigation that I carried out together with therapeutic collectives and activists from the Despatologiza social movement, this dissertation portrays this situation from the therapeutic technique known as hippotherapy - zootherapy aided by horses - and compares it with modernist processes of medicalization with the objective of verifying medicalizing continuities and discontinuities. From this comparison, we intend to analyze the fabrication of the de-medicalization of bodies and life in the context of complementary and traditional medicines debated both globally and in Brazilian social movements. Therefore, we seek to understand the following question: how can some treatment and rehabilitation techniques, such as hippotherapy, signal or subvert the most heteronomous practices of modern sciences, such as medicalization? In view of this phenomenon, it is argued that medicalization can be made or undone through political activism, inventions and complementary therapeutic arrangements and from the socialization of bodily phenomena. To clarify this question, I analyze the problem through this ethnographic ground, seeking to reveal how this therapeutic technique can indicate a set of new medicinal practices in modernist societies. With this, I describe other ways of conceiving life and body therapies through the alterity relations between humans and horses whose coexistence takes place in a continuous technopolitical relationship of “biopsychosocial” innovation and intervention. It is concluded that these groups practice treatment and healing techniques in a subversive way to the concept of medicalization, suggesting the “depathologization of life and body” as a way of socializing and practicing health in these contexts.