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INTRODUCTION: Musculoskeletal and mental disorders are relevant in the workers' disease process, and ergonomic interventions that include guidance and physical exercise consist of strategies of health promotion. Integrative and complementary practices are presented as a possibility of promoting comprehensive care and yoga consists of a therapeutic alternative. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effects of an intervention including educational measures and hatha yoga in musculoskeletal pain, disability, and stress in professionals of a university hospital. METHODS: We selected 125 professionals with musculoskeletal symptoms of intensity ≥ 1 who did not practice yoga and randomly assigned them to intervention (n = 63) and control (n = 62) groups, requesting answers to the following questionnaires: initial characterization, the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire and a numeric scale, the Pain Disability Questionnaire, and the Perceived Stress Scale. The intervention group went through a 12-week program with educational measures and hatha yoga. At the end of the study period, both groups answered to the questionnaires once again. We compared data before and after the intervention and between groups. RESULTS: Both groups presented improvements after 12 weeks, but the difference between mean results obtained in the first and second data collections revealed that the levels of pain, disability, and stress decreased more strongly in the intervention group than in the control group. Considering that the intervention group began the program in worse clinical conditions, the program led to a reduction in the difference between groups, but this was not enough for the intervention group to reach better results than the control. CONCLUSIONS: The intervention promoted improvements in the intensity of pain, disability, and stress among the participants of the intervention group. Similar programs could be explored in the promotion of occupational health.

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The purpose of this pilot study was to explore whether individualized Reiki given to cancer patients at a Brazilian hospital improved symptoms and well-being. Data from 36 patients who received 5 Reiki sessions were collected using the MYMOP and were compared before and after their treatment and also with 14 patients who did not receive Reiki and who acted as a comparison group. Twenty-one patients reported feeling better, 12 felt worse, and 3 reported no change. Of the comparison group, 6 patients reported feeling better and 8 felt worse. The Reiki practice delivered as part of the integrative care in oncology did produce clinically significant effects, although not statistically significant results, for more than half of the patients undergoing cancer treatment.

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UNLABELLED: The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the Program Yoga and Health Promotion offered to 18 participants, lecturers, workers and students of the State University of Campinas, Brazil. The program aimed at favoring well-being in relation to their physical, emotional and mental condition. Practitioners completed the Measure Yourself Medical Outcome Profile to identify the symptoms and the perception of self-reported well-being, and the T test was applied to the results of the participants' profiles before and after the program. Narratives were used based on trigger phrases. Seven categories (self-control; self-perception; well-being; body awareness; balance; mind-body; reflexivity), were identified through thematic analysis. The results were discussed according to the triangulation of methods. RESULTS: 14 participants scored better profiles, with a p-value <0.05. As regards the narratives, there were no negative perceptions about the yoga practice. IN CONCLUSION: yoga was a positive intervention for the group of participants.

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The use of Complementary and Integrative Practices (CIP) is on the increase and its institutionalization in Primary Health Care (PHC) is a challenge. This article discusses the use, care, and policies of CIP at international and national levels found in the indexed literature. A review of the literature in PubMed/Medline and the Virtual Health Library was conducted using the key search words "Homeopathy", "Acupuncture", "Herbal Medicine", "Body Practices", "Primary Health Care" and other related terms in English, Spanish and Portuguese between 2002 and 2011. The use in the literature of CIP for the treatment of specific diseases from a biomedical perspective was observed, as well as evaluations of its use for the treatment of specific diseases focused on the reaction of the users and professionals and the analysis of the political, economic and social viability of CIP in health services. The conclusion drawn is that what is predominant in the literature is the quest for the scientific validation of CIP and a biomedical methodological bias in the designs of the studies, which does not contribute to clarifying the potential care of CIP in PHC.

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The scope of this paper is to analyze the self-declared symptoms and state of well-being of participants in the "Yoga and Promotion of Health" program, which consisted of hatha yoga lessons. It includes body exercises and breathing techniques, as well as ethical and philosophical content, administered to two groups of lecturers, workers and students of a public university in the State of São Paulo from August to December 2011 and March to June 2012. The participants filled out the adapted version of the Measure Yourself Medical Outcome Profile form at the beginning and end of the program. Of the 20 participants in Group 1, eight filled out the form and half of them reported the improvement of self-declared symptoms; as regards the state of well being, three of them felt they had improved. In Group 2, which also had 20 participants, nine completed the program and all of them reported improvements of self-declared symptoms and well-being. In conclusion, yoga is a mind-body practice which exerts an important therapeutic effect on most practitioners and also promotes health for the majority of them, expanding their capacity of self perception and self care. However, it should be noted that it doesn't achieve the same positive effect for all practitioners as some yoga traditions advocate.

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This article analyzes Boys in white: student culture in medical schoolby Howard S. Becker, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes and Anselm Strauss, considered a model of qualitative research in sociology. The analysis investigates the trajectories of the authors, the book, qualitative analysis, and the medical students, emphasizing their importance in the origins of medical sociology and the sociology of medical education. In the trajectory of the authors, bibliographical information is given. The trajectory of qualitative research focuses on how this methodology influences the construction of the field. The investigation of the students' trajectory shows how they progress through their first years at medical school to build their own student culture.

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This article is an analytical report on the 20-year trajectory of the 'medical rationale' category that emerged in the early 1990s in the area of Social and Human Sciences in Health in the field of Public Health. Its objective was to study complex and therapeutic medical systems and traditional, complementary and alternative medicines. Based on a critical review of the literature, it presents some aspects of the cultural, political, institutional and social context of its emergence, as well as its main contributions and developments on a theoretical level and on social policies and practices in health. The southern epistemology concept of Boaventura de Sousa Santos is used to reflect upon the contribution of the 'medical rationale' category to the critique of the post-modern scientific rationale and to the creation of a new epistemology in health.

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This article discusses the field of Collective Health from the disciplines that structure the curriculum of the Collective Health area postgraduate courses in 2006. From the database of programs, including master's, doctoral and professional masters were classified 1,171 subjects, in what we call disciplinary fields, linking this to the P. Bourdieu's notion of champ (field). Twenty-eight disciplinary fields were described, in three large groups. It was concluded that the field of collective health has a wide range of disciplinary fields, especially the frequency: Epidemiology (16%), Humanities and Social Sciences in Health (7.9%); Curriculum (7.9%); Systems and Health Services (7.4%), Environment and Health (7.2%) Health Policies (6.3%).

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In this paper we review the issue of post-graduate in Public Health in Brazil. The review aims to situate the main specific aspects of building the field of postgraduate studies and its institutionalization, preceded by a study of the main features of post-graduate courses. The main sources are documents setting out the legislation on the graduate and data on their development in the country. All studies reviewed show an increase in the number of programs and courses that began in the 1970s, diversification of the names and areas of concentration and continuity of regional imbalance, since 66% of the programs are in the Southeast region.

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The article analyses the literature on curriculum and its impact on the field of public health. This analysis aims to locate the specific lines of theoretical developments of the curriculum in order to establish a theoretical framework and conceptual study to the curricula of public health in graduate courses. The main source of data is bibliographic, national and international. It was concluded that the formulation of a 'curriculum as fact' and a 'curriculum as practice' is interesting as starting point for analyzing the structure and process of formation of the curricula of graduate health courses. Other points concern the need to formalize that the curriculum should be based on a framework to define the characteristics that distinguish the contents and methodology of the areas, classically known as social science, epidemiology and planning. On the other hand, establishing a framework that supports inclusion of new areas and which parameters are established between the curriculum of undergraduate and postgraduate studies in public health.

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This article discusses the various meanings ascribed to the concept of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in Brazil, where research on this theme has a limited tradition in terms of influences from anthropology, sociology of knowledge and epistemology, and sociology of CAM and clinical medicine. By means of the concepts identified in the literature, we elaborated a table with types of meanings. The terms Alternative Medicine and Complementary Medicine were found in more than one of the types in the table. Alternative Medicine identifies a model of medical practice influenced by the social, political, and economic context and by the logic of scientific production based on opposing pairs. Beginning in the 1980s, the important volume of reflections on official medical practice and the search for other forms of knowledge production led to the creation of the concept of Complementary Medicine. Its meaning is that of a new epistemological form of knowledge production between the official and alternative poles, a set of therapeutic practices, and confusion with the nomenclature for ancillary medical diagnostic tests, referred to in Portuguese as "complementary exams".

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BACKGROUND: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has become increasingly high profile in prosperous countries over the past 2 decades. Alongside this has been a renewed interest in the use of traditional medicine (TM) in poorer countries. Academic attention has tended to focus on either CAM in rich countries or indigenous TM in poorer ones. However, such a differentiation leads to a potential to gloss over global complexities, such as the study of countries where both CAM and TM are a potentially significant part of health options. Brazil is just such a country. Brazil is marked by massive socioeconomic inequalities; cancer is its second highest cause of death. To date, there has been little research on CAM/TM in cancer care in Brazil. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to provide the first exploratory data on the proportion of the use of CAM and/or TM among low-income cancer service users in Brazil. METHOD: A survey of cancer patients was conducted in November 2004 in a public-sector hospital in a major city in Brazil. A random sample (n = 92) was generated from a list of all appointments scheduled during that month (n = 570). Eighty-nine of the 92 patients contacted (97%) completed the questionnaire. RESULTS: Of the sample, 62.9% had used at least 1 form of CAM or TM. However, this headline figure is potentially misleading. The data reveal an almost total absence of use of non-indigenous international CAM; it also shows prayer to be a major contributor to the relatively high use rate. DISCUSSION: On the basis of this small-scale exploratory study, there is no evidence that those international CAMs ubiquitous in the West are spreading to low-income cancer service users in Brazil (despite anecdotal evidence of its increasing presence in the country generally). Moreover, when excluding prayer, use of indigenous traditional medicine was found to be relatively low. Further research is needed to examine these findings on a larger scale and to explore the relative importance of social, cultural, and economic factors behind them.

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