Here is a recently published article from Alianza GIST Brazil representative Valeria Hartt about access to information, health equity and knowledge in cancer care in Brazil. Valeria described her article below:
In order to add contributions to the idea of equity in health, this article takes a careful look at the concept of access to information, with its limits and borders, in the context of the Social Determinants of Health and their interaction with public policy. It is through these lenses that this text addresses the practices of activism and advocacy of oncology patient organizations, and how they disseminate lay knowledge as a form of expression of the “social production of scientific knowledge” in the 21st century.
Two generations of studies were proposed to investigate health inequities, first describing the relationship between poverty and health, and later with the intention of seeing health gradients of different socio-economic realities (Adler, 2006). This article offers a third wave, one more interested in the mechanisms of production of health inequities (LINK; PHELAN, 1995). That motivation brings the perspective of information to this debate, and asks how access to information affects our understanding of inequities in health.
Here, we have assumed the lay knowledge as theorized by Popay (1998) and described in the experience of Epstein (1996), Callon and Rabeharisoa (2008), which serve as an anchor to a new theoretical and conceptual proposal able to accommodate and recognize the value of lay knowledge as a privileged contribution to understanding health inequalities (Popay, 1998).