Patient autonomy in the therapeutic process as a value for health

This paper presents a critical review of concepts of health and disease in biomedicine, as a contribution to rethinking health in positive terms. We take Canguilhem's epistemology as a starting point in order to highlight fundamental issues in the discussion about health, integrating it with a new understanding of the concept of patient autonomy in the therapeutic process, using an analysis method that takes an approach based on complexity. In this perspective, autonomy is relative, relational and inseparable from dependence. It is also a necessary condition for health, in its broadest meaning, as the self-recovering potential of the human organism. Therefore, autonomy becomes a fundamental value to be reinstated and defended in medical practice, as well as in the social and human sciences' field. A discussion of the implications of the concept of autonomy is presented, if only as a harbinger of a future state, as a precondition for health, citizenship and for life itself.