My pain is not hers: ethnographic investigations on the lives of women with rheumatoid arthitis
Anthropology of health. Rheumatoid Arthritis. Experience of illness. Therapeutic Itinerary. Intersectionality.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune, degenerative, multifactorial disease that affects four times more women than men, and manifests mainly through severe joint pain, swelling, and caused difficulty moving due to body limitations. Thus, this research seeks to investigate the life experiences of women with rheumatoid arthritis, in order to understand through the life trajectory and therapeutic itinerary, the experiences of the disease, depending on the lived social context and other implicated factors, such as critical events (DAS, 1995) - which can drive biographical disruptions (BURY, 1982), or changes in life projects (VELHO, 2003) - and in this attempt to perceive the different therapeutic practices developed aiming at healing and “remission” processes.. Therefore, I consider that social relations influence the understanding of the disease, but also the care practices of the research interlocutors. Thereunto, I conducted the research from the Rheumatology Outpatient Clinic of the Onofre Lopes University Hospital, a place that receives the demand of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and also, from another perspective, did research through social networks, through the snowball methodology and virtual network environment research, specifically Facebook and Instagram groups of people with RA. In order to investigate questions about intersectionality as an analytical perspective (PUAR, 2013), we intend to understand the social reality in which the experience of the disease is lived, reflecting from the discovery of the disease, the therapeutic processes to the access to social benefits and rights through the seven key research interlocutors:Jasmim, Tulipa, Girassol, Margarida, Aroeira, Gloriosa e Orquídea. Through the narratives to understand details of the illness experience, through the diagnostic processes, the itineraries therapeutics, and the trajectories of life crossed by the social markers of difference, particularly salient in each person.