Francesco Bonanno (Università degli studi di Messina)
Mariachiara Ceccio (Università degli studi di Messina)
Teresa Pintaudi (Università degli studi di Messina)
Filippo Cavallaro (Università degli studi di Messina)
The space for disclosure and professional testimony, thanks to the plot defined by the authors in the novels, takes us to unexpected dimensions and fascinating adventures. Then it happens that one quotes The Radical Chick Census written by Giacomo Papi and is surprised at how it is current and close.
Doing science popularization is an activity of communicating addressed to the general public, consisting in specialized notions and research of a discipline in a form that is easy to understand. The space that has been available in the online journal Messina Medica 2.0, like so many spaces for discussion, are opportunities to grow as a profession and to improve as professionals.
It is a chance to learn to present ourselves clearly and to relate with other professionals. In this way we can be recognizable for specific expertise and our own disciplinary field.
Writing and discussing leads to being recognized individually, while these activities need to be done by all physiotherapist in order to proclaim our own identity.
Since 2019, every 15 days a space has been open for discussion and presentation, focusing on novels and essays analyzed by physiotherapist’s point of view (often relating them to clinical episodes).
We analyzed the contents of more than one hundred articles published, to note the aspects correlated with concern or denunciation, evoked by simplification or reductionism.
At the time when the discipline of physiotherapy also entered in our country’s academic sphere with the establishment of university courses, we had the awareness that we would have to know the body of knowledge of the specific profession, the techniques and how the basic sciences served as the foundation of that knowledge. This was a new thing for the world of medicine and for the whole encyclopedic field of knowledge.
In the health knowledge sphere there were those who had studied ways and times that allowed serious and/or incurable diseases not to be survivable (even it was discovered that certain interventions of physiotherapy limited disease outcomes). Early undergraduate students were suggested to write a glossary of terminology in physiotherapy. For some areas it was easier to relate in others not.
In the text and content analysis of the articles published by Messina Medica 2.0 in the bookseller’s “Noterelle riabilitative del padre del libraio” there are some signs that should act as a spur for the profession.
Two problems are most obvious: firstly the simplification which is a specific risk of popularization, then that of reductionism which is a specific risk of the scientific thinking.
Due problemi sono più evidenti in primis quello della semplificazione che è un rischio specifico della divulgazione, poi quello del riduzionismo che è rischio specifico del pensiero scientifico.
In the illness filed, the body alone faces in autonomy with suffering with the tools at its disposal. Today, with scientific knowledge, we know the complexity that underlies our lives, so we cannot relegate all to simple word, commonly used, with an etymology and a history.
Alessandro Baricco argues that “whenever we make certain buzzwords of brutal simplicity enough for us, we burn years of collective growth spent not getting screwed by the apparent simplicity of things.”
Culture is not a “smoky thing”. Culture is the streets on which we walk, the houses where we live, the words in our mouths that some other human, time ago, who knows why, invented. With the ”Rehabilitation Noterella” point of view, we can rewrite it this way,: “Physiotherapy is not a smoky or magical thing. Physiotherapy is the roads on which the reasoning of the physiotherapist walks, the spaces where it is practiced, the words that run in our mouths and that some other human, in practicing and describing his interventions has found and used. Culture is a bet that we can eventually understand each other. That is why it sometimes bothers”.
