title: [Family, a care unit for its members: reflexive concerns].
abstract: This reflection has searched through a brief historic perspective, to understand the family as a care unit for its members. It has as objective, to awake a health professional's more conscientious new look for the care to elderly people in chronical condition, aiming to extend this look to the family as a unit care. This reflexion leans on Systemic Thought, that is, on the comprehension that the family isn't the sum of parts, but pressuposes the whole and the parts at the same time, thus it isn't possible to see the individual only without looking at the family as a whole in the dynamical relations and interactions between them. After the realized re-reading it became that it's necessary to rethink new strategies to approach the care to the bearer of a chronic disease such as diabetes, that embrace the whole family as focus attention of its members health, considering the complexity, intersubjectivity and instability of the new pos-modern science paradigm.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Saúde da Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia.
authors.forename: Luzia Wilma Santana
authors.initials: LW
authors.lastname: da Silva
authors.forename: Danuzia Santana
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: da Silva
authors.forename: Lucia Hisako Takase
authors.initials: LH
authors.lastname: Gonçalves
authors.forename: Maria Arminda da Silva Mendes Carneiro
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: da Costa
authors.forename: Maria Manuela Ferreira Pereira da Silva
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Martins
authors.forename: Maria Henriqueta de Jesus Silva
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Figueiredo
mesh_terms: D017028:Caregivers; D005190:Family; D006801:Humans