A sociological view on the epistemic privilege of biomedicine: Deconstructing the metanarrative

Abstract

Despite the growing public recognition of its incompleteness and its need to make it dialog with other knowledges, biomedicine continues to figure as a metanarrative, as an epistemologically superior medical model, defining and regulating what is meant by “medical knowledge”. One of the great obstacles – if not the greatest – to the creation of an effective ecology of knowledges in the field of health care lies in the persistence of this representation of superiority. Based on a review of the literature about the subject, this article aims precisely at deconstructing the essentialist version of biomedicine’s superiority, showing how this supposed superiority results, in fact, from a complex sociocultural framework of historical production. In this sense, revisiting the existing literature, the article develops a condensed perspective around the main pillars of the construction of the hegemonic power of biomedicine in the context of Western modernity: (1) the umbilical connection of biomedicine to modern science and its colonization trajectory; (2) the anatomical-clinical process and how biomedicine established itself, through this process, as a normative/regulatory power, gaining legitimacy and protection by the States; (3) the alleged greater effectiveness of biomedicine in the context of its greater compatibility with the new capitalist imperatives; and (4) the constitution of a strong biomedical professional movement and its closing strategies in the construction of its hegemony.