The trajectory towards alternative medicines: an analysis of health professionals' social representations

This article focuses on social representations of alternative medicines by a group of professors from the School of Medicine and health professionals from the public health system in the city of Campinas, S?o Paulo, basically physicians and nurses. The article also emphasizes personal trajectories by which these health professionals opted for a dissident theoretical and practical perspective vis-à-vis the hegemonic positivist scientific medical paradigm. The research methods were mainly ethnographic, from a phenomenological perspective. The article concludes by sustaining (in theoretical terms) the importance of these dissident perspectives for scientific development.