Il malato e il nemico. Questioni etiche e antropologiche dell’uso sociale della medicina

SUMMARY The patient and the enemy. Ethical and antropological issues on the social use of medicine. The article is a philosophical reflection about the predictive medicine, a new form of medicine which could become an insurmountable oracular truth, when the disease is reflected culturally in processes of exclusion and negati- ve acknowledgment, processes that identify definitively the human being with his organic damage. A cultural risk, moreover, that enmity respect to the patient, in which key policy intends in terms of citizenship fragile, as for example the face of attempts to exploit the new methodologies of deep rea- ding of the person. Ability to predict that, in its practical applications, puts us in front of many problematic aspect, even unpublished. There is thus the pos- USO SOCIALE DELLA MEDICINA Medicina e Morale 2012/4 587 A. PAPA sibility that the therapeutic action itself is concerned to respond to the needs of a mere medicalization with the sole aim of satisfying the criteria of pro- ductivity functional into a social welfare-related health linked to bio-organic interpretative models of the human person. Hence the implosion of the same concepts of disease and sick, so the disease is understood as a private fact and social debitum even when only presumed and waiting and on the other the sick person seen as dysfunctional, not worthy of friendship and social so- lidarity that is, as a kind of public enemy. Which, on a political level, results in a loss of citizenship. In new and more complex scenarios of diagnostic medicine – in front ofthe legacy genetics and compared to the so-called bio- politics – this raises the problem of citizenship as an emergency fragile and vulnerable citizen, because of the prevalence of reading the image of gene- tics’ human being represented by the comparison of screening, diagnostic te- sts and risk profiles.