From the communication of information to the production of meaning as a strategy for promoting the right to health.

Communication in health care has been discussed as a strategy that ultimately fails to promote patients’ and users’ right to health because it does not consider their prospects or disregards the socioeconomic circumstances in which they live, contributing to the occurrence of disease and suffering. Based on an anthropological approach, communication will be reconsidered here as a process of participatory production of the meaning of reality, promoting a reformulation of the experience of disease and allowing for the identification of the forms of social intervention capable of supporting such a reformulation. Introducing the concept of the right to meaning as a basis for the identification of other rights also promotes the concept of therapeutic efficacy. These concepts will be reconsidered in terms of transformation, not only in terms of possible transformations on the anatomo-physiological plane that can be performed by biomedical intervention techniques or changes in the relationships of meaning that care relationships focused on the right to meaning can promote but in terms of a transformation in the patients’ social relationships.Keywords: Doctor-patient relationship, health communication, medical anthropology, therapeutic efficacy, inequality in health.