Feeling Out of the Box: Ambivalences of Unexpected Amelioration among Sickened Health Professionals through Displacing Cooperations in Brazil

Ambivalences of Unexpected Amelioration among Sickened Health Professionals through Displacing Cooperations in Brazil

Abstract

How do people with diagnosed autoimmune diseases feel, and what they do and think when they unexpectedly encounter an unregistered drug that may help them to heal, instead of palliatively controlling symptoms of autoimmune reactions through conventional immunosuppressants? What then if they are health professionals who became patients? How does such an encounter affect their lives, their perceptions and attitudes towards their respective medico-legal environments? In this article, I analyse letters exchanged between a physician in Brazil and eight of his patients, who are also health professionals, mainly between 1997 and 2000, concerning their experiencing of using an unregistered medicine, the “anti-brucellic vaccine” (VAB), to treat different immunopathologies such as rheumatoid arthritis. Considering VAB users as capable of systematically evaluating and communicating their experiences of illness and recovery, I seek to understand and discuss the tensions surrounding the repositionings and attitudes of affected health professionals within the co-production of medical evidence in the context of disruptive biotechnological innovation in Brazil. Apparently, their own experience with VAB seemed to have enabled them to re-ground their medical knowledge, experience, and skills in relation to their own and someone else’s health in anticipation of the mediation regularly played out by conventional medical knowledge, technologies and procedures. Furthermore, when VAB-using physicians self-analyse and dialogue with others, writing and exchanging evaluative reports about their own and others’ health and therapeutic experiences of using VAB, they seemed to implicitly co-produce medical evidence that can be taken into consideration by potential users.