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Resumo

The emergence of a 'critical medical anthropology' offers a perspective that can complement and enrich the explanatory model (EM) approach, particularly in the case of illnesses that are polysemic and have political and economic implications. Repetition strain injury (RSI), an occupational illness which became epidemic in Australian industry in the early 1980s, became the focus of multiple and disparate biomedical EMs. We argue that the biomedical debates about the etiology of RSI can be understood in terms of the ideological role of medicine in reducing RSI to a physiological or a psychological phenomenon, individualizing the problem, disenfranchising (or blaming) the injured worker, and deflecting attention from those structural conflicts endemic in the workplace (and exacerbated by economic stringencies) which fostered injury, pain, and disability.

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