The medicine is the least of the problems: following networks in adherence to AIDS treatment

Abstract

This essay intends to question Bruno Latour’s methodological proposal. In research on people living with HIV and their adherence dilemmas, using Latour’s proposal, we sought to address the following issues: how does one bring the universes of people living with HIV closer, without fractioning their lives? How does one understand the relationship established between PLHIV (People living with HIV) and their medication without setting aside the issue of medication management from other experiences? Despite the obstacles, common to those who decide to follow certain itineraries (the dangers of the journey, as Brazilian author Guimarães Rosa would say), the research guided by the methodology proposed by Latour – the ethnographic methodology of the “Actor-Network Theory” – allowed us to follow the actors’ steps, although timidly and initially, without fractioning their lives and without making isolated cutouts, monitoring what happens in a network and is interconnected, interfering and suffering interference. The ethnography carried out led us through tortuous paths, forcing us to venture into confusing itineraries, networks of humans and non-humans, medications, swimming pools, NGOs, health care, and a network of relationships among people living with HIV, through the difficult paths that our interlocutors developed.