The purpose of this article is to examine integrality as the ruling principle of Brazil's National Health System (SUS) from a comparative perspective, based on works coordinated by LUZ and cols. on the concept of "medical rationality" and also on Fleck's epistemology. Integrality has different meanings according to patients and specialized healers; it is more relevant to the latter, for whom it represents a permanent mission, being linked to the healer patient relationship. Integrality constitutes a difficult problem for biomedicine, whose expertise has torn the patient apart and focused its actions on "biomedical diseases". For this field of medicine, the more specialized the environment, the more integrality is blocked. The possibility of mitigating these blocks lies on the outskirts of specialized circles, found in the work of multidisciplinary teams, properly ranked by Brazil's National Health System (SUS) as the focus of Primary or Basic Healthcare. On the other hand, other rationalities such as homeopathy or traditional Chinese medicine have facilitative knowledge and practice for the inner circles of integrality, and the challenge - in addition to its incipient presence in this System - is to draw integrality away from its original esoteric circles into the world of its practices.
Integrality; Medical rationalities; Alternative medicine; Public health