Minor and major health: a Nietzschean reading

• Published in: Ciência & saude coletiva Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 965 - 974
• Main Authors: Biato, Emília Carvalho Leitão, Costa, Luciano Bedin da, Monteiro, Silas Borges
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Portuguese; English
• Published: Brazil 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Attitude to Health; Delivery of Health Care - utilization; Health; Humans; Philosophy
• ISSN: 1678-4561
• DOI: 10.1590/1413-81232017223.18412015

This paper aims to discuss the concept of health, understood as multiple and plural. We use Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical thought as an analytical tool, allowing us to reach a typology involving minor and major health. While the first is normative and sustained by an ideal of healing, the second is an expanding strength, a condition constantly achieved. If minor health follows a preset life moralization script, major health relates to the expanded living being, which affirms its creative nature and transcends established rules. The notion of major health embraces the overcoming of imperative models rooted in biomedicine-based practices and approaches to health collective actions. Nevertheless, on the one hand, if this movement extends the co-participatory nature between staff and users of the health system, on the other hand, it lacks more radical actions to break with the moral nature of health-disease processes. Not refusing life's own vicissitudes, major health understands the need to incorporate pain and suffering involved in individuation movements.