[Towards the revision of the Italian code of medical ethics: thoughts of an extremist.] / Verso la revisione del Codice di deontologia medica: riflessioni di un estremista.

ABSTRACT

In November 2022 the Italian medical council (Federazione nazionale degli ordini dei medici chirurghi e odontoiatri) started the revision of the Italian Code of medical ethics (Cme) with the first race dating back ten years. Since then, the Italian doctors are dealing with the scientific, ethical and economic challenges together with the more recent ones posed by the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic to the National health system underlying the ongoing crisis of the medical profession. Additionally, this critical context requires the doctors to develop new technological skills, a complete and effective adherence to the Ebm principles, a new view regarding the relationship with the other health care professionals and the related changes of clinical practices fostering a responsible use of resources. In brief, what is required nowadays from doctors is to rethink about the meaning of science, ethics, economics and public health and to make new and more appropriate connections between the instances conveyed by these different disciplines. The Cme main aim consists in providing appropriate rules in step with the current transformations of medicine and society to doctors for ethically acting in clinical practice, assuring the citizens, the institutions and law of the scientific competence, the protection of the fundamental rights of the sick person in compliance with the constitutional principles. Under this assumption and in line with the above mentioned professional crisis, at least the overall guidelines aimed to solve it should have been settled before starting the Cme review also in order to ensure the necessary coherence between the new contents drawing the doctors new social function and its codal systemisation. Unfortunately this stepwise approach was not considered.Lastly, to develop the new Cme looking towards the progress of medical profession, systematic and methodologically appropriate consultations would have been necessary to know, value and balance all the different positions of doctors, allowing them to be responsible for the change of their profession. However, such a decision was not made.