I will try to offer answers to these questions, focusing in particular on three words–health, science, profession (medical).<\/p>\n
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- With regard to health, the traumatic events we are experiencing require us to reexamine the relationship between personal and public well-being. Good health (whose presence we usually ignore, because we take it for granted and realize its importance only when we lose it), helps us understand more clearly the bonds that unite us. Our interdependence is strong.\u00a0 And this applies both to individuals and to peoples. \u00a0Covid-19\u2019s chief target, the respiratory system, provides a useful analogy.\u00a0 An elementary and indispensable function is at risk.\u00a0 We are dependent on resources that are not only shared, but that put us in very close communication with each other through the air we breathe. \u00a0This helps us realize our interdependence more than diseases, such as cardiovascular morbidities, whose effects are not spread to others. \u00a0As a practical result, for example, we recognize that wearing a mask protects not only the wearer but also those the wearer interacts with.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
The same can be said for vaccination.\u00a0 By protecting myself I protect others, both because I reduce the number of hosts in which a virus can replicate itself, and because if I remain healthy, I avoid overloading healthcare systems that are already under stress.\u00a0 We know how important this is not only for Covid sufferers, but also for those afflicted with other diseases.\u00a0 For example, deaths from heart attacks and cancer have increased. \u00a0We have learned that healthcare delivery systems fared better where there is an appropriate balance between hospital treatment of diseases and territorial networks of assistance and disease prevention. Likewise, systems that have become unbalanced in favor of disease treatment to the detriment of prevention have lost effectiveness.\u00a0 This is an important subject for future reexamination and restructuring.<\/p>\n
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- Science has shown its limitations. It has taken time for science to understand an unknown virus, its behaviors, and its effects. \u00a0We have found that, with respect to researchers and what they know, it all comes down to a question of belief.\u00a0 The scientific world of experimentation and rational demonstration depends on trust.\u00a0 We see this when processes break down because trust is lost (analogously to what happens when health itself is lost).\u00a0 As the Pope said in the interview of January 11, 2021: “I don’t know why someone says: “no, the vaccine is dangerous”, but if the doctors present it to you as something that can go well, that has no special dangers, why not take it?”. \u00a0In that context, however, if experts argue imprudently with each other in print or electronic media, they present a spectacle of conflict that disorients and discourages. \u00a0They contribute to the \u201csuicidal denialism\u201d the Pope Francis has spoken of. \u00a0If discussion of differing opinions is legitimate in laboratories and specialized journals, it is not prudent when the audience is non-experts, particularly if done for publicity or self-aggrandizement. \u00a0Scientific evidence is the product of a consensus that is progressive and always subject to revision.\u00a0 It must be managed and advanced wisely and with critical judgment.\u00a0 We are called on understand \u2013 and help others understand \u2013 better not only the enormous potential of technoscience, but also its delays and limitations. \u00a0We must proceed with greater accountability, including with regard to communication.<\/li>\n
- The healthcare professions\u2019 highest duty is actual care for the sick. Their generosity and the quality of their work have earned them grateful recognition.\u00a0 Their strength in dealing with the unforeseen pandemic situation has been the result of an ability to combine public service with care for suffering individuals.\u00a0 Comparisons with war, which are sometimes made, do not seem to me to capture the true nature of healthcare activities. \u00a0Those comparisons celebrate dedication by calling it \u201cheroism,\u201d thus making it seem exceptional (and thus implying the possibility of a return to some lost normalcy).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Certainly, the circumstances of the pandemic are, and have been, exceptional, but they have revealed a level of commitment that does not need an emergency situation to be called into action.\u00a0 Healthcare personnel could not have worked in the ways that have given rise to such gratitude and recognition if that had not already been their normal way of serving. \u00a0Even in everyday practice there is an attitude of self-giving that makes it possible to deal with critical situations when they happen.\u00a0 It is a commitment that not only promotes life, but promotes the desire to live, encouraging the recovery of health. \u00a0And when healing is not possible, healthcare professionals accompany the patient in helping him or her accept the limits of medicine and the approach of death. \u00a0This accompaniment is the expression of a shared search for meaning that is revealed in the doctor-patient relationship, and that is not diminished when limitations are encountered.\u00a0 Accompaniment can thus be a place of encounter and solidarity, just as the Lord Jesus has shown us by becoming a man, being born of a woman, and taking on the evil that weighed on history until He was raised up upon the Cross.<\/p>\n
Once this pandemic is over, we need to deepen our understanding of the way others have been taken care of during the present crisis. \u00a0In order to consolidate this awareness, it is important to encourage times and spaces for shared clarifying and reexamining what has happened, failures as well as successes. \u00a0The experiences of those who have benefitted from healthcare services must also be listened to. \u00a0Doing so will make it possible to take into account the relational aspect of medical practice, as opposed to its purely technical aspects, and thus avoid its being reduced to a series of clinical and organizational protocols, while at the same time giving greater value to the resultant interpersonal encounters that will hasten the increasing maturity of our shared humanity.<\/p>\n
[1]<\/a> Moment of prayer and \u201cUrbi et Orbi\u201d Blessing presided over by Pope Francis (27 March 2020) | Francis (vatican.va)<\/a><\/p>\n
[2]<\/a> Holy Mass on the Solemnity of Pentecost (31 May 2020) | Francis (vatican.va)<\/a><\/p>\n
European Federation of Catholic Medical Associations
\nMarch 26, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n
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