Body, aesthetic surgery and public health: a case study

Abstract

The body, in the occidental culture, was for many centuries rejected, feared and devaluated; today, differently, it is super valued and became a precious good, for this reason it is well-taken care of and shaped, due to successes and virtues of the individual contemporary being attributed to it. In the search for an ideal body, many people look for aesthetic surgeries as solution for their problems and improvement of their self-esteem. This article aims to understand the relation of the aesthetic surgery with the Public Health and the promotion of health. We carried out a qualitative study, using the case study method, with the objective of understanding the underlying beliefs, attitudes, perceptions and cultural processes to the narratives of the college's students submitted to aesthetic surgery and of the plastic surgeons. The results demonstrate that the body must be understood as something more complex than the physical and visible body, because many of those who look for aesthetic surgery continue unsatisfied, seeing that their dissatisfactions attributed to their body are also a matter of them being attributed to their soul. We conclude that aesthetic beauty is becoming a medical subject and that aesthetic surgery is a question of public health, as the results depend on the motivations and expectations of who searches for this procedure.