Medical Humanities and Artificial Intelligence
There is awidespread malaise that envelops the entire healthcare landscape, affectingpatients and their families, professionals working at full pace in hospitalsand in community care, but also administrators and policymakers.Dissatisfaction is widespread, even in the face of the efforts made to meet thegrowing, and often unprecedented, health needs of individuals. However greatthe resources invested, there is always the distinct sense that they areinsufficient and fail to reach even the essential level that patients andprofessionals aspire to. It is as if a virus had penetrated our National HealthService, depriving it of effectiveness, at least on a subjective level: peoplewant something more from our healthcare system, something better, somethingmore meaningful. It is not merely a question of economic resources. It is,rather, a question of human resources. Something that can restore a more humandimension to the doctor-patient relationship, to the very meaning of illnessand malaise, overcoming technological barriers and obstacles, in order torediscover a relational gaze rich in competence and understanding, extending tocompassion where necessary. Something that we conventionally call MedicalHumanities — that is, a medicine in which the one who cares and the one who iscared for meet on that boundary line which is the threshold of our sharedhumanity, with its limits and its enormous resources.
The changesaffecting our society at an ever-accelerating pace demand of all of us adecisive change of course, if we wish to grasp their sense and meaning withoutbeing overwhelmed by them. The healthcare landscape, when viewed in itsentirety, is one of the most difficult to interpret, even for those deeplyinvolved in it, because it reflects a radical reversal of perspective. At thecenter of modern medical reflection lie chronic pathologies, the physiologicalvulnerability of the elderly, and the multiplication of forms of disability.All of this requires us to overcome the disconnect that has developed over theyears between medical care needs and social care needs, in order to rebuild anintegrated, socio-health approach in which illness, malaise, and loss ofautonomy are measured and addressed starting from their impact on theindividual's quality of life and on the resilience of their social network.
It is necessaryand urgent to change our outlook on the training that healthcare personnelreceive — training that involves not only physicians and nurses, but all theother professions that contribute to creating the overall well-being thatpatients and their families constantly and urgently need. We are speaking ofMedical Humanities, which are proving increasingly necessary at every stage,not only of the diagnostic-therapeutic process, but also of thesocio-rehabilitative one. Reflection on Medical Humanities begins at the stageof prevention, envisioning a One Health perspective, in which the vision of alldecision-makers helps to grasp the countless connections linking our health tothe biological, social, and cultural context that surrounds us. To adopt theperspective of Medical Humanities means never forgetting that the person whosuffers is a human being who has not only a clinical history, neatly recordedin a health record, but a specific biography of their own — a story that cannotbe reduced merely to a list of so-called emerging problems, because often themost important problems are precisely those that do not emerge and need helpcoming to the surface. Film, theater, poetry, but also many novels tell thestories of people who suffer without fully knowing what they suffer from or whythey suffer, and who display emotions that struggle to surface or, when theydo, seem to have lost their point of balance. It is music, the encounter with awork of art, that awakens a lived experience from which a memory emerges,gradually becoming clearer and gaining coherence and substance. And evenmalaise dissolves and softens within a horizon of hope.
Everything caninfluence our health, and in fact it does, even when we are unaware of it andtend to reduce cause-and-effect relationships to overly simplistic terms. It isprecisely on the ancient principle of causality that we must once again focus,in order to uncover certain fallacies that have long been handed down, and toreassess instead new questions of meaning: not only how, but also why.Technology, and biotechnology even more so, offer us increasingly sophisticatedanswers about how events are linked to one another, and Artificial Intelligenceis able to identify unprecedented interpretive pathways. Understanding themechanisms that link causes and effects has always been an essential challengefor the development of scientific thought. Essential, but not sufficient: it isnot enough to understand how a phenomenon occurs if we fail to grasp itsreasons, its whys, its meanings — which form deep connections with the world ofemotions, values, and interpersonal relationships: everything that we have alwaysconsidered to be the proper domain of Medical Humanities. That strong andprofound relational gaze that binds patient and caregiver, and which notinfrequently includes the entire family unit.
It thereforebecomes worthwhile to rethink medical education by adopting two essentialcoordinates: artificial intelligence, which seems to monopolize the debate onthe relationship with emerging technologies, and Medical Humanities, whichtraditionally involve both first-year students and experienced professionals,in different but not dissimilar ways. Leo XIV spoke of Magnifica Humanitas inaddressing the topic of Artificial Intelligence, creating a semantic bridge ofrare interpretive power. If we wish to grasp the profound dynamism set inmotion by the use of artificial intelligence, we cannot lose sight of theextraordinary value of our humanity. And it is along this path — traditionaland innovative at the same time — that Medical Humanities are discovering a newopportunity, a kind of second youth. They are, in fact, the most powerfulantidote to a sort of techno-robotization of care, in cases where there is evenan attempt to replace caregiving personnel with highly efficient devices thatare, however, extremely poor in relational terms. Greater technology must bematched by greater humanity, to the point of discovering what some arebeginning to call Technological Humanities... We must not dehumanize thedoctor-patient relationship by flattening it to an almost mechanical level ofequivalent services; rather, we must strive for a pervasive, constant, andwidespread humanization of the gestures that care requires.
Nostalgia for abygone era is returning to the fore — for an approach to training that recallsthe beauty and richness of a doctor-patient relationship in which mutualfriendship carried notes of absolute trust and deep sharing. A time whenneither medical paternalism nor an exasperated need for self-determination wasat stake; rather, the aim was to make necessary decisions together to ensurethe greatest well-being for both parties, within a logic of consensualdecision-making in which responsibility, too, belonged to both, with fullrecognition of their dignity.
