Speaker: Francesca Marin (Università di Padova). As part of the Polpost Meetings
Abstract: In this talk I will promote the idea of mutual dependence between trust, medicine and uncertainty, and I will critically analyze those approaches that either partially recognize such interdependence or propose a misrepresented view of medicine in terms of its relationship with uncertainty, negatively affecting trust in medicine. Indeed, on the one hand, nowadays the trust-medicine dyad is sometimes recognized without the acknowledgment of the medicine-uncertainty dyad, or vice versa. In other words, the role of trust in medical practice and the presence of uncertainty in medicine could be approached as issues which are unrelated to each other. In this way, the process of planning to promote trust in medicine and strategies for responding to medical uncertainty might be separately addressed. On the other hand, intolerance or even a refusal of medical uncertainty could affect trust in medicine because, by considering medicine itself as a science and a practice characterized by full certainty, claims of infallibility on the one side, and suspicions as well as incredulity on the other, might be fostered. In order to avoid all these reductive views and to promote a well-placed trust in medicine, I will argue for the need for a change from a dual scheme, i.e. trust-medicine or medicine-uncertainty, to a triple pattern, that is, the trust-medicine-uncertainty interdependency. It will be shown why this pattern should be promoted in ordinary times and ever more in extraordinary circumstances, such as the Covid-19 pandemic.