Pandemic and self-care: the denial and subalternization of popular knowledge

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic once again demonstrated the hegemony of biomedicine, not only with regards to Chinese, Hindu and Japanese academic medicines, as well as traditional Latin American medicines, but also related to the processes of self-care, despite the fact that these were the main preventive mechanisms used by subjects and microgroups to confront the Covid-19 pandemic until the introduction of the coronavirus vaccine. Moreover, the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization and the medical/health systems of countries worldwide, acted in such a way that self-attention appeared as a biomedical technical mechanism rather than being considered as a process developed and applied by the population. Therefore in this paper I describe and analyze the concept of self-care, differentiating it from the biomedical concept of self-care, trying to show the mechanisms of hegemony that biomedicine develops to obscure the true self-care actors, as well as their subalternization and their need to assume the decisive role that they have played in either positive and negative terms.