ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's development as a professional in health organisations, initially as a physician and later as an administrator. This development started with uneasiness and feelings of powerlessness during the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the middle eighties in Brazil. His observations of the management of this epidemic made him question the human and social dimension of medical work. He came to understand the limitations of individual physicians and started to see medicine as a social practice that requires critical social approaches for problems of health and disease in societies, especially in unequal societies. Habermas taught about the co-origin between subjectivity and inter- subjectivity, which means that the author cannot learn without interacting with the other, and he cannot do things better without learning. With Habermas' theory of communicative action we can conceptualize systems as part of the living world. Speech and communication become relevant ethical actions.
