VERY STRANGE the contemporary era. Desecration, skepticism and malicious and gossipy interpretations are the rule. This is how even the most crystalline and ethically less questionable figures are unlikely to pass unscathed under the microscope of social media. This was the case for the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, for example, who was speciously charged with a vaccination privilege because he was seventy-nine, without considering that when you enter the eightieth year you are unquestionably entitled to receive the coveted dose.
It is therefore not surprising that doctors, difficult figures to pigeonhole by definition, have gone from one super-heroic representation of the first months of pandemic, to the daily litter that sees them as protagonists of camarille to insert untitled relatives in the lists, or of unionized saboteurs of capillary immunization programs. In addition, the doctor is not sympathetic: he graciously concedes, he is full of himself and arrogant, he often favors the remunerative aspect of the profession and his perception can vary from absent-mindedly insensitive to too empathetic and not very technological.
Doctors at the forefront of the documentary on the Covid-19 epidemic
by Valentina Arcovio
Narcissism
The pandemic has certainly helped to reveal aspects of narcissism which, while involving all professions (I mention for example cooks, magistrates and politicians), take on disturbing aspects in doctors. Nobody can deny, however, that many have risked and paid with their lives to have spent themselves on the front line without ifs and buts. It is out of respect for these martyrs that we need to review the judgment on the category and understand that, beyond isolated degenerations, the doctor is a resource and we must protect him. Protect it so that it can better protect us. The controversy over the request for indemnity for young people is in recent days vaccination trainees, who was asked to take the field without predicting that the very rare adverse event that should occur after a vaccination was not attributed to him as gross negligence. But God forbid!
Cynics and heroes: this is how cinema has told doctors
by Vittorio Lingiardi
A social resource
We ask them to take the field, obviously still immature and uninsured (because that’s not what they are authorized to do), we put a syringe in their hand and we also expect them to run the risk of having a warranty notice delivered home. and to take charge of a criminal lawyer to guide them on a path that at best will last two years. With this perverse logic, we should not be surprised that, as happens in the US, the doctor will use the right to deny himself even for reasonable practices with the sentence: I am not confortable with! (I am uncomfortable).
Until we understand that the doctor is an irreplaceable social resource, whose primary role is to take care of the citizen’s health, and we will continue to stigmatize his mistakes by pillaging him or pursuing every mistake (or alleged mistake) as if making a mistake were not human and possible even in this context, the risk of paying a very expensive defensive medicine, as is happening in the United States whose errors we are going through uncritically, will be an inevitable price.
Paolo Nucci is pProfessor of Ophthalmology at the University of Milan and author of the book “Why (not) be a doctor” (Piemme editore)
The Robot / Genoa
At Gaslini a robot to treat young patients
by Michela Bompani
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