Of the many contexts in which health education actions are conducted, the present work focused on medical consultations. Aiming to identify and characterize these actions within medical attention, the transcripts of fifty consultations with hypertensive patients, conducted by ten family health physicians in three municipalities of the State of Bahia, were analyzed. The results show that consultations are conducted in a way that emphasizes both medicalization and hypertension control. The patient's narrative is inhibited or interrupted by the physician's narrative, medical attention remaining restricted to individual symptoms, with no grasp of the psycho-social and cultural dimensions of the health-illness-care process. In most of the consultations, the educational action is secondary and superficial, leading to prescriptive recommendations. However, one of the physicians appeared to have a different approach, which points to the possibility of a type of medical attention based on dialogue and on integrating biomedical and sociocultural aspects into healthcare.
health education; healer-patient relationship; family health program; hypertension