Moving between “Chronic Diseases” and “Secret Cures”: Bionetworking in the Context of Autoimmunity in Brazil

Bionetworking in the Context of Autoimmunity in Brazil

Abstract

In this article, I explore from an anthropological Global South perspective the following question: how does the engagement of patients and physicians for unauthorized immunostimulant therapies for autoimmunity in Brazil impact the globally established biomedicine based on the use of palliative immunosuppressive drugs? My aim is to understand changing perceptions related to immunity, autoimmunity, immunological therapies, biotech- nological innovation and regulation as constitutive of contemporary biomedical culture and of life sciences in Brazil. By addressing some forms of collaboration and deviance between patients with autoimmunity and physicians, I describe how they adopt and promote immunostimulant drugs as scientific innovations that meet difficulties to become legalized and that tend to be disqualified by established biomedical authorities. For it, I present a case study of regulatory experience and make a comparative digression involving respectively two immunostimulant therapies: the “anti-brucellic vaccine” (VAB—vacina anti-brucélica), and; the “autohemotherapy” (AHT—autohemoterapia). Like other immunostimulant therapies, both VAB and AHT are strongly associable with regenerative medicine and may be accessed through the informal sector. My argument is that established biomedicine has become increasingly circumnavigated in contemporary Brazil, while regenerative medicine is simultaneously emerging as a transnational paradigm shift through assemblages of life and respective moralities.