Can we consider the nurse’s conduct to be the fruit of a sick mind or the cultural product of a new Middle Ages? Not knowing the protagonist of the story, any answer would be risky at the moment. Meanwhile, regardless of the news, measles cases in Italy have increased 5 times compared to 2016 and the United States warns its citizens who travel to Italy about “health risks”.
It can be said that the scientific evolution concerning public health is often not in harmony with public opinion.
The reasons? Scientists who communicate in an approximate way (sometimes the frustration of non-excellence – also present among researchers – is compensated for by seeking contact with the press); popularizing journalists who disseminate aiming at the media coverage of the news rather than the actual content; ignorant public on the subject, always willing to move in uncritical masses.
Very approximate summary of the studies – distorted diffusion through the media – public with little specific culture to understand what was disclosed: this is the circuit that distances medicine from public opinion.
When news is disclosed it will have its own course in public opinion, free and different from the one it undertakes in the scientific field. Since Galileo’s time, science has not been concerned with finding truth and if it does, we are not talking about science. Scientific thought, incessantly, formulates hypotheses, carries out verifications and subsequently confirms or not the initial hypothesis. It does not discover “truth”. This is ignored by many. It is probably ignoring this procedure that pushes a part of the population to consider medical thinking contradictory and unreliable precisely because it “changes opinion”.
For vaccines, an even different thing happened. A 1998 article published in the Lancet suggested a link between vaccinations and autism. The news immediately had a notable media coverage.
Not only was the article proven to be a scientific fake, which all subsequent studies (the most important ones published in the British Medical Journal in 2011) had disapproved of, but the author of the fake and fraudulent article, Wakefield, was also discovered. he had received money to publish fake news in order to support legal cases initiated by a lawyer against some pharmaceutical companies that produced vaccines. It was also discovered that Wakefield had patented vaccines that would have made him big money by replacing those he had indicated as the cause of autism. If I am not misinformed, I believe his medical degree was withdrawn following this criminal act.
Despite the total groundlessness of the false arguments, concomitant with the disclosure of the fraudulent article, there has been a reduction in vaccinations in the United States and Great Britain, with an increase in measles cases associated with encephalitis and death. And while scientific thought continued to formulate and rehash hypotheses, public opinion continued its course of thought fueled by mistrust and the search for confirmation of this, supporting the principle of freedom of the individual not to get vaccinated and not vaccinating their children and forgetting to place that of beneficence and justice towards third parties at the top of ethical principles.
And back to our nurse? Mental diseases exist in nature, no more and no less than diseases affecting other organs; the feeling of a cultural Middle Ages is widespread. Certainly the two aspects influence each other. They are both expressions of being in the world that we must accept, certainly not indulge, with the awareness that nothing is lasting.
