Submerged in the deafening din of press, radio and television, which have had all their wishes fulfilled, with no holds barred, on the legitimacy of the candidacy for head of the government of a person who is not only a Member of Parliament of the Italian Republic and a Member of the European Parliament but also a well-known businessman, we try to understand where the serious problems that journalists, Italian and foreign, fear daily for the Italian citizen.
Parliamentarians, members of dozens of committees, journalists who write for dozens of publications at the same time, directors of government agencies and companies who continually switch from one job to another. Themselves outstanding masters of multiple personal roles, they are really good only at legislating for those of other people. Limitations and incompatibilities have been continuously brought freshly baked for Italian doctors, with ad hoc laws that are always preceded by denigrating press campaigns with a great beating of drums about marginal cases that is aimed at imposing unnatural impediments on doctors who do their own work diligently and conscientiously.
The desire for state control of medicine in Italy imposes aberrant rules, by which an illustrious Italian professional, renamed “Baron” for the occasion, was prohibited from free exercise of his profession outside his own hospital working hours, because that would have conflicted with the interests of the hospital concerned.
The situation was thus created in which a doctor-painter was allowed to paint, and a doctor-journalist was allowed to write, and a doctor-politician was allowed to engage in politics, but a doctor-doctor who wanted to practise the only thing he really knew how to do, that is medicine, was prevented from exercising his profession. All in the name of conflict of interest. A net division not only between public and private sector activities, but also between the various branches of the same public sector activity. So that a hospital surgeon cannot perform outpatient activities in a multi-speciality outpatient centre, because only surgeons who do not work in a hospital centre can work there. In compensation, attempts are being made to favour the practice of general medicine in co-operatives. Evidently there is no conflict of interest in co-operatives, in part because they obey another concept that is so fashionable today and is known as non-profit.
As if a certain number of doctors could join to form co-operative without any particular economic interest in doing so. A profession aimed solely at alleviating human suffering requires a spirit of altruism, lack of which would denature the performance of medical activity.
The doctor has always and everywhere worked in a system of communicating vessels that allows anyone to utilise the work of the professional , independently of whether that professional works in a university, a hospital, specialist institute or a oncological centre, without incompatibilities or national or extra-national limitations. (Traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)