This article reports on part of the prior mapping (Ferla, 2002) of innovative popular and official ideas for clinical practice and medical education, associating this process with similar evidence collected during the national stage of the 12th Brazilian National Health Conference. Analysis of this empirical material indicates that spaces for people's participation in the health system have produced innovative contributions to clinical practice and health system management. These same contributions help reshape clinical practice and management, intervening extensively in the very meaning of social control as customarily interpreted in the 1988 Constitutional provision concerning popular participation in the health system. This trend, which strengthens the aesthetic production of these concepts, is similarly oriented to a set of processes which, according to various authors, demarcates the concepts that modern science has used to produce knowledge. Thus, what is frequently referred to as a crisis in social control of the health system may actually reflect insufficient interpretative resources for grasping a level of greater power in popular participation and more up-to-date expression.
Popular participation; clinical practice; health management; roving clinical practice; innovation in health