“I rather operate my heart than my mouth”: reflections on oral health care

Abstract

This article shares reflections on oral health care that emerged from the dialect relation between professional practice and theoretical research. It interrogates the concept of care disseminated by the biomedical discourse, in which care is a technique geared towards cure. We believe care to be an ontological dimension, an intrinsic characteristic of the human being from which they constitute themselves in the world. As such, we use the notion of buccality to situate the mouth as a territory that take part in the social production and reproduction process, completely penetrated by the culture and psychism. The mouth is, therefore, socially produced—a body-territory endowed with subjectivity that is crossed by multiple experiences throughout life. Hence, dentistry’s concept of care fails to encompass oral health care in all its complexity, making it necessary to renounce an a priori dentistry to understand that people’s socio-historical realities and experiences are materialized on their mouths, opening space to understand care as an intersubjective encounter crossed by potent and transformative affections.