Informed Health Choices, the course that teaches scientific thinking in medicine to children – breaking latest news

No vax, boh vax (term “launched” by Massimo Gramellini), and pro vax, or those against, undecided and in favor of vaccines for Covid19. It is the way the population is divided in relation to the serum at this time.

If everyone, however, used scientific critical thinking, the approach would be profoundly different. They are convinced of it Camilla Alderighi and Raffaelle Rasoini, doctors and founders of the research project «Informed Health Choices», «Informed decisions on health», arrived in Italy in 2020, which was created with the aim of studying and transmitting the scientific approach, especially applied to health. In essence, it is a course of teaching critical thinking in Italy, starting from primary schools.

Alderighi and Rasoini, both cardiologists, started teaching critical thinking in medicine to children at the Istituto Comprensivo Poliziano in Florence. The course is destined to spread to other schools in Italy, given the adhesion and success it has enjoyed among teachers who have become aware of it (in September the course will be held online: to join you can send an email to [email protected] with reference to the “Informed Health Choices” project)

The teaching is based on the methodological tool of medicine based on scientific evidence, “Evidence based Medicine”: “In other words – explains Dr. Alderighi – only through comparative studies between health treatments that are as free from bias as possible (prejudices ) it is possible for doctors to understand whether a treatment is effective and safe, and therefore feasible to patients. In medicine – points out the cardiologist – the last word has the proof, not the expert opinion, and the children to whom we have taught the rules of the scientific method understand these concepts very well. When we started, in January 2020, we were still in attendance and we managed to do seven lessons, the most important, while the last three we did in dad. Well, we realized that at the end of the course, in June, the children had made the subject their own to the point that when we reported several examples relating to different types of studies on health treatments, they were able to explain which ones were valid, and which not, for medicine. For example, after the lockdown, we asked them if they thought that a study done on twenty-six patients, as in the case of hydroxychloroquine, was valid according to the parameters of health science, and on the other hand if cortisone was. Their answers almost surprised us for the expository and methodological clarity with which they faced the questions ».

The formula is therefore clear even for children: for a cure to be prescribed, it must be based on clear evidence that demonstrates its effectiveness, and for such tests to be considered valid one of the requirements, along with others, is that they cannot be based on a study based on a small number of patients. Furthermore, the effectiveness or otherwise of any cure cannot depend on whether it is new or expensive. These are parameters from which the choice of prescription for health care is independent.

The teaching takes place in such a way interactive with children in the classroom, whose teaching material consists of a comic book and a text for the exercises.

It is a teaching that comes from afar, from the founder of the scientific method Renè Descartes, our Descartes. Why – at least in part – have we forgotten it? For sure, the children will remind us, from whom we will have a lot to learn in the future.