title: Minor and major health: a Nietzschean reading.
abstract: This paper aims to discuss the concept of health, understood as multiple and plural. We use Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical thought as an analytical tool, allowing us to reach a typology involving minor and major health. While the first is normative and sustained by an ideal of healing, the second is an expanding strength, a condition constantly achieved. If minor health follows a preset life moralization script, major health relates to the expanded living being, which affirms its creative nature and transcends established rules. The notion of major health embraces the overcoming of imperative models rooted in biomedicine-based practices and approaches to health collective actions. Nevertheless, on the one hand, if this movement extends the co-participatory nature between staff and users of the health system, on the other hand, it lacks more radical actions to break with the moral nature of health-disease processes. Not refusing life's own vicissitudes, major health understands the need to incorporate pain and suffering involved in individuation movements.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Saúde Coletiva, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso. Av. Fernando Corrêa da Costa, Coxipó. 78060-900 Cuiabá MT Brasil. emiliacbiato@yahoo.com.br.
authors.forename: Emília Carvalho Leitão
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Biato
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Estudos Básicos Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Porto Alegre RS Brasil.
authors.forename: Luciano Bedin da
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Costa
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Teoria e Fundamentos da Educação, UFMT. Cuiabá MT Brasil.
authors.forename: Silas Borges
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Monteiro
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy