It takes courage to choose to be a doctor. Because he comes into contact with the sick and their anxieties, because he never really detaches from work and is always a doctor, because he is condemned to a sort of Sisyphean fatigue that studies him without end. However, if there is a vocation, these which to most seem negative aspects become the real stimulus to undertake the medical profession. And yet the figure of the doctor outlined here seems to belong more to the past than to the present.
Paolo Nucci, who is full professor of Ophthalmology at the State University of Milan, he wrote the book – he calls them notes – that every future doctor should read (but it should be read by everyone because we are all by nature patient): Why (not) be a doctor (Piemme). Among the many considerations in this logbook of a doctor who questions himself and confesses in public there is precisely the difference between yesterday and today: the figure of the doctor who had to manage a dystocia or a myocardial infarction in the full of the night is gone, while the doctor has been replaced by a team of doctors who consult online and can count on resources that fifty years ago we never even imagined.
But if doctors have changed, so have patients that no longer hang from our lips: the doctor-patient relationship has become conflicting and we often go to the already educated doctor, with two opinions behind him, ready to question clinical competence and intuition and, in short, this is how the progressive increase is explained of medico-legal queues. That’s why it takes courage to be a doctor today.
The experience that – it is appropriate to say – the whole world has made of the pandemic from Covid-19 it tells us directly that, courage or not courage, we need good doctors, good nurses and, most importantly, prudent patients. Precisely the relationship between the doctor and the central patient in the re-definition of the medical profession. After all, the doctor – the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who worked on body and soul and their health loved to say – a wounded healer: a woundless doctor too distant from the patient, while in the relationship between doctor and patient it is precisely this distance that goes reduced by keeping experience and science together. Medical knowledge – says Nucci – is learned through a daily and painstaking exercise, repeated in its logical sequences just like an algorithm, in which, while not neglecting the intuitive qualities of each one, it is difficult to derogate from a precise protocol, I would dare to say to one checklist, similar to what an airplane pilot performs before each maneuver.
The most beautiful chapter in the book dedicated to being a doctor, Giuseppe Remuzzi also points out who signs some introductory pages saying at least three things that deserve attention. First: good doctors must be able to work immediately in the hospital, when enrolling in the specialization school, because doctors become close to the sick, under the guidance, of course, of those who are more experienced. Second: in addition to doctors there are nurses and they are the ones who make the difference between a good hospital and such a hospital. In fact, it is the nurses who spend the most time with the sick, who notice if something is wrong and, for the most serious illnesses, they make the difference between life and death. Third: here is the part on Covid and family doctors. For Remuzzi, family doctors – precisely the figure of the medical doctor – are the first bulwark against the virus. They have an agreement with the National Health Service, but are not dependent on it. Instead, we need to mobilize them, creating a protocol, equipping them with individual protection systems, to ensure that most Covid-19 patients can be treated at home.
Conclusion: the denial of the title, not by chance put in brackets, an affirmation or, if you like, an invitation to clarify your ideas before venturing into the most beautiful profession in the world, is undoubtedly the most necessary.
June 14, 2021 (change June 14, 2021 | 16:33)
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