Multidisciplinary collaboration or exclusive prerogatives? Tensions between professional ideals and tasks

Abstract

The multidisciplinary cooperation has expanded greatly since the middle of last century, and was integrated naturally in everyday life. But it comes with increasing disputes over claims of primacy or even exclusivity of certain professions. In Brazil, during the last decade was fought a noisy dispute about the place of the medical activity in the concert of professions in healthcare. This dispute had its epicenter in the so-called Law of the Medical Act. The question in dispute was whether the complexity of the object and the specific knowledge about it would legitimize special privileges for one profession at the expense of the others, or whether, instead, it would be more prudent if different perspectives were aggregated without hierarchy in a multiprofessional field. The text discusses the question of the legitimacy of exclusive prerogatives granted to professional groups, a classic theme in the functionalist perspective, reconstructs the lines of argumentation used in defense of the Medical Act Law and, finally, it looks how other professions currently position themselves in defense of their clams for prerogatives.