Reabilitar é incluir?: um estudo de práticas em Reabilitação Físico-Motora

Abstract

This investigation aimed to understand a certain homology between 'improve\recover' bodily functionalities and 'inclusion' of certain individuals. In this sense, we consider contemporary dimensions in theoretical debates and in medical-social practices in relation to rehabilitation and people with disabilities. Thus, we seek theoretical and methodological elements to sociologically understand rehabilitation practices as part of theoretical and political discourses on disability. We access a dimension of this debate when we propose field research with professionals in the health area, specifically in rehabilitation, who work in a University Outpatient Clinic. These professionals are physical therapists and occupational therapists who have absorbed and produced clinical and scientific practices aligned with the parameters of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, the ICF. The ICF has been considered as a new clinical application model based on the idea of human functioning. This document produced by the WHO proposes to guide the production of a definition, classification and political-social evaluation of "people with disabilities". At the same time, the ICF does not present itself as an etiological compendium of "disability" (officially translated in the document as incapacidade), but an instrument for its biopsychosocial understanding as a "component of health". As the ICF was historically produced as a 'social-medical' framework of disability, we paid attention to the way in which the terms 'functionality', 'disability' and 'disability' were elaborated in this document. At the same time, we seek to understand how this Classification of Functions has been absorbed in rehabilitative treatment practices for people with disabilities. The aim was to understand how these discourses on disability relate to clinical and scientific areas of rehabilitation knowledge. And how, apparently, these clinical-therapeutic spaces manipulate the production of “physical-social” functionalities and capabilities. To do so, we do not start from a watertight definition of disability, but how this category has been mobilized in places that aim to produce its care and treatment. In this way, we proposed to observe the daily life of agents in the area of habilitation/clinical rehabilitation and, through the theoretical and practical understanding of their work, to access how the categorical dimensions of functionality, disability and disability are 'materialized' bodily and socially.