The physiotherapy service of Núcleo de Atenção Médica Integrada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Brazil patients’ illness phenomenological approach

Abstract

This article aims to disclose the meanings of the getting ill experience in a worldly perspective that is, based on the notion of human life and consequently, pathology, implied in the sensible world, in the history and in the culture. Through a fieldwork carried out in the Serviço de Fisioterapia do Núcleo de Atenção Médica Integrada da Universidade de Fortaleza, which combined the ethnographical and phenomenological methods, beyond the biological understanding about human illness, focusing the world of the experiences as a privileged field for meanings of been ill. The results show that getting ill is an experience of  despotencialization and social exclusion, but it can be also an opportunity for life review, as well as secondary gains.