Sunday 25 May 2014 - Of Vitogol – LIVESICILY
My thoughts and my smile immediately flew to Totò, a slightly sadistic surgeon who approaches the operating table where poor Pietro De Vico lies. The professor is short-sighted enough to mistake a sister for a sailor. “When I work I don't want strangers!”. "But Professor there is no stranger." “And who is that sailor?”. "But Professor, that's her sister". the progress of science. Everyone has to do his job. I'm a surgeon and not a cobbler. You are a patient who has no patience. And what a patient you are, have patience".
Perhaps the skit would not have been so funny if the code of ethics just approved by the National Council of the Federation of Medical Associations had been in force, which abolishes the term "patient" to replace it with "assisted person". I have the impression that, rather than dealing with terminological sophisms or professional updating done on French papers and not on scientific journals, the Order to which I belong should concern itself with other and more substantial issues. For example, that of the progressive exclusion of doctors from the clinical governance of hospitals or that of defensive medicine and the role in medical cases of certain experts so "biased" as to forget any rule of respect for Medicine and colleagues.
And so, it seems that the trend of "politically correct" terminology is about to invade wards and clinics as well. We left with the maids, who had become "family collaborators" or housekeepers. Then it was the turn of the street cleaners, promoted to the rank of "ecological operators". But the triumph of synonyms, more or less imaginative, concerns the "oldest profession in the world". When I was a kid, the black news of the newspapers reported terms like "one of those", "worldly", "strollers". Then there was the advent of the term "whores", an expression that represents a crasis of the Registry registers of a few decades ago in which "the children of sin", generally abandoned in front of churches or on the wheels of convents, were labeled as “children of an unknown mother”, abbreviated to “children of an unknown m.”. Today "those" are defined as "escorts", a term that rose to the peak of popularity after the revelations of Mrs. D'Addario on the habits of certain high-ranking satyrs. Maybe, but it's always about prostitutes.
Returning to the topic that is more familiar to me, I find that the term "patient" to define a person, sick or not, who seeks the services of any healthcare professional is more appropriate today than ever. It takes patience to find your own doctor, given that clinics are often like the churches in Venditti's song: "Closed when you want to confess". It takes patience when you have to book a hospital visit with the CUP that sends you back to the Greek calends because the organs
