Résumé
In Africa, AIDS treatment with Highly Active AntiRetroviral Therapy first depends on economical considerations that limit access to medicines to a minority of people. What are the cultural effects of the availability of these medicines? Antiretrovirals are not only "indigenized" as some other medicines; they are the substratum of patients' experience that, beyond adherence, leads them to change their social relationships; they become disclosers for "politics of life" antagonistic from global to local levels, through arousing categorizations in access to medicines; they polarize the health system & lead to re-define legitimacies at borders between biomedical, traditional, & popular sectors. The impact of these treatments in terms of changes in perceptions, practices, & social relationships, goes beyond the biomedical sector, as they arouse the production of neo-traditional medicines, which legitimacy is built through borrowing to biomedicine, on spaces left vacant in the fields of identity & accessibility, in a process promoted by globalization. 38 References. Adapted from the source document.