by Enzo Bozza
14 FEB – Dear Director,
let’s say it frankly: we have no authority and with it we have lost all bargaining power. Hence the defeat in all areas of medicine, from the hospital to the territory. We allowed politics to stick its nose where it shouldn’t, transforming a priestly profession into clerical work for cadastre officials.
The arrogance of politicians went beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the competence of roles, even indicating how to be a doctor, with what tasks and for how many hours a day. We lacked only the pedagogy of the task, having never learned it from Hippocrates onwards, but we must learn it from the decrees because the University and the profession in the field have taught us nothing.
The fault is ours alone, of us doctors, because we have allowed more than one to confuse care with healthcare costs, dedication to the person with hustlers, time spent in the clinic or in the ward as ordinary work weighed in money and never as a value of the person, both doctor and patient.
The fault is ours because for decades we have delegated the value of our work to unions that have only cultivated their own interests, protecting power structures that only support themselves.
It would not be explained otherwise because as a general practitioner, after 34 years of profession, I still do not have the right to vacation and sickness, like any other worker, because the management and tools of my work are still all at my expense, and why they continue to pay me a lot by the kilo and by the piece, as if my job were a dairy that is valid for the cheeses it produces.
Unions that endorse the idiotic idea of replacing a family doctor with another hospital, that health house, a cooperative for 50,000 residents who should mimic the logic of the outpatient clinic for people who for years have been looking for not ONE doctor but THE doctor, the one who he calls you by name and people call you by name.
We have lost authority even with people who, by dint of being treated as numbers to manage, have begun to think that we can only make recipes and certificates and that health has become only the assembly line of a factory. A factory of certificates and never of smiles and handshakes.
It is our fault, because we have allowed all this and we allow the newspapers to spread only the perception of the problem and never the truth of the problem, this is how we became for journalists, overpaid slackers or virology stars, hustlers of opinion, who they confuse opinion with science and are paid by the coin for a modicum of notoriety. So we played authority and credibility, forgetting that science is done in laboratories and not on TV.
It is our fault if our salaries have stopped at the Punic wars because we have never been able to put our medical expertise on the scales and we have exchanged it for a plate of lentils, never taking to the streets when they have upset the meaning and the meaning of our work and instead of giving weight to our dignity, we handed it over to the officials of the trade unions and the government on duty, losing face and wallet and with them the enthusiasm of a job that no longer means anything if it has stopped to be CARE. Caring for people and for ourselves.
We have the politics we deserve and we are in the tunnel that we ourselves have taken. To get out of it, the solution starts with ourselves, we must go back to being doctors and never again just officials of a public service that drags itself into its ashes but will not rise from the ashes except with the will to express the dignity of the clinic and the dignity of the person. It’s our fault: let’s start from here.
Dr. Enzo Bozza
General practitioner in Vodo and Borca di Cadore
February 14, 2022
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