In recent years, we have witnessed the appearance of a series of new lines of discourse in the field of public health, both globally and domestically, such as health promotion, health vigilance, family health and vulnerability reduction, among others. However, it seems to us that a true consolidation of these proposals and their consequent development depends on fairly radical transformation of our way of thinking about and providing healthcare, especially with regard to its assumptions and its underlying philosophical principles. We would like to bring these thoughts to the debate as a theoretical deconstruction, with a view to contributing to the reconstruction that is underway in healthcare practices. Thus, care is examined from three conceptual points of view: as an ontological category, as a genealogical category and as a critical category. Hermeneutics applied to the interface of these three points of view allows one to indicate directions that may yield a productive effort of healthcare practice reconstruction: an active movement of the professionals and healthcare services toward actively acknowledging the presence of another party in the arena of care, the optimization and diversification of the forms and quality of the "I-Other" interaction in this arena and the enrichment of the horizons of healthcare knowledge and performance from a decidedly interdisciplinary and intersectorial perspective.
Health promotion; public health practice