Internal medicine and the holistic approach to the patient between globalization and advanced technologies

Abstract

Although Internal Medicine (IM) has played for many years a crucial role in the medical education and in the diagnostic framing of the most common diseases, starting from the beginning of the 70's the knowledge explosion, the recognition of the multidisciplinary nature of IM and the consequent impossibility for the Internist to master an ever growing array of notions have resulted in the development of specialized disciplines restricted to pathologies of single organs or apparatus. The parcelling out of medical knowledge has thus induced the onset of a number of specializations stemmed from IM and, as a direct consequence, an identity crisis of the same IM. Social transformations and variations in the epidemiology of several diseases have contributed to such crisis, including aging, frailty and disability, polypathology and chronicity. In the last few years, however, IM has regained a central role in medicine, in that the Internist is an expert of "medicine of complexity" and the only specialist able to envisage an holistic approach to the patient. The development of biotechnologies, characterized on one side by nanotechnologies and on the other by the instruments of diagnostic imaging, has provided an important contribution to make clinical medicine more and more precise and reliable. The genomic analysis of novel pharmacological targets has opened new therapeutic horizons, especially in the oncology field. A striking aspect of modern medicine, again based on unreasonable expectations of improvement and recovery, is the progressive increment of malpractice claims leading to an indemnity payment. Defensive medicine has been the answer to face this growing problem: physicians are in fact induced to prescribe a much higher number of often unnecessary examinations and laboratory tests, that result in a wasting rise of health costs. In view of the rapidly changing reality, it seems fair to ask the question as to whether in our country the medical education is abreast of the times. And the answer can only be diversified to reflect a leopard skin image. Indeed, familism, nepotism, unfairness, inefficiency and comparative evaluations marked by an excess of local factors have inevitably caused merciless and often deserved criticism that has been extensively debated in several monographs.