Di formazione e di felicità. Riflessioni sul percorso formativo di medicina. On education and happiness: reflections on medical training

The article is about the unhappiness of doctors and the causes of that, which literature places in a gap between expectations and reality, between training and work. The question is: can the current medical core curriculum contribute to making future doctors more happy? Some critical elements in addition to positive contributions are presents. In particular, there is a surplus of some “UDE”, which seem to fall into other professional areas, by somehow dissipating the expertise of other professionals rather than favoring their collaboration. On the other hand, there is a lack of training and reflection on the nature of knowledge, on methodological aspects, especially epistemological and philosophical. There is an urgent need to translate what is being transmitted in operational and universal terms, to the detriment of a kind of knowledge, which should primarily provide instruments for understanding reality. There is evidence of the presence of different forms of knowledge, and it is suggested that a happiness, more connoted in the eudaimonic sense rather than hedonic, can be pursued by enhancing the relational dimension, which is multi-level, from the way of thinking, building and de-build knowledge, from relationships with other disciplines, from ties with colleagues, from relationships with patients and relatives. Finally, some proposals regarding the medical training are suggested.