Eduardo Blanco Cardoso
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Title: Social representations of cancer in students who attend private and public schools Brazilian
Biography
Biography: Eduardo Blanco Cardoso
Abstract
The cancer as a disease was set in the social imaginary. Individuals build their impressions from the contributions of doctors, media and popular discourses, making it diffi cult to prevent. The educational intervention in elementary and high school is
centralized in disseminating “biomedical” information, remaining oblivious to the social connotations. The present study aims to identify in 980 adolescents, 12 to 18 years, their perceptions of the disease. For it, a voluntary and anonymous questionnaire was
applied, which allowed a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the dice. The results indicate that the negative representations of cancer predominate in younger age groups, a fact that gradually decreases with advancing age. They are not static and change structurally in dependence of the environments and social contexts, predominating in the male sex. Basically disease is viewed from three perspectives: “destruction”, focusing the expressions on the death, especially when there is a family history or known aff ected; “incurability” whose association with the death divides equally opinions regarding the binomials: life/death and heal/sicken, and finally “resolution”, depending on the diagnosis and early treatment. Despite there is consensus on the benefi ts of early diagnosis, most of the opinions describes the disease as invasive, painful, and cruel, with potential to extend. The obscure logic of "contagion" resurfaces in lay discourse as a possible means of transmission. In the perception of the students, “traditional barriers for access” to the health system, provable in the adult world, continue to be an obstacle to the cure.