The article examines how health education groups that bring together people with diabetes promote the empowerment of its members, while stimulating the restructuring processes of health care traditional relations. The research that originated the text is based on qualitative methodology, involving an ethnography among a diabetics association “health groups” in the city of São Paulo and within a health center in the city of Campinas (SP). Interviews were conducted with their members, especially women aged between 53 and 87 years and belonging to the popular classes. The purpose was to explore the sociability characteristics developed in those groups. Friendship was considered a relevant category to understand the forms by which new practices of health care are characterized, in contrast with more traditional relations as family bonds. The picture points to the dynamics of relations' re-enchantment in the public space in the context of reflexive modernity.
Empowerment; Health groups; Friendship; Care; Diabetes