This paper aims to analyze the enlargement of meanings in narratives on the health-disease process among people with chronic diseases who participated in a health education operative group. It points to the narratives based on a experience whose main objective is to foster the collective elaboration of meanings for illness, and to integrate personal experiences and knowledge with biomedical knowledge and clinical practice. Through semi-structured interviews, the work evaluated the construction of meanings on illness beyond the biomedical model, and the impacts of this new narrative on the way the patient lives, at present, his clinical and therapeutic process. We found that people, through interchange, valorization and legitimation of meanings and knowledge arising from individual and collective experiences within the group, change their concepts on the health-disease process that transcend the medicalizing perspective of biomedicine.
Narrative medicine; Health education; Chronic diseases