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The grief caused by the death of a young person will surely not be compensated by identifying the person responsible, who will probably be tried for medical malpractice.
However, this grief has become the issue around which one of our most important newspapers has constructed a communication that may well become a hefty boomerang even for Corriere della Sera. Although Repubblica online published an article on the same topic, it accurately cited its references, presented the news in a civil and correct manner, and most of all, updated the story throughout the day in relation to incoming news.
Even the Federation of Medical Doctors considers Homeopathy a medical act. In view of this, the article referring to the “Homeopath” who caused a death that was published in the morning newspaper along with two others in the online version resulted in giving people the suspicion that all homeopathic doctors are people who cause harm in connection with possible criminal events.
As if this weren’t enough, the lay-out technician placed two opposing interviews that utilized the same inductive scheme: on one side “the doctor” and on the other side “the homeopath” (representing the “villain” of the three column headline, placed just above), as if the homeopath were not a doctor. The columnist should be reminded that a homeopath is a doctor, and perhaps he even knows more, and not less, than his colleagues. The real problem is that this is something that is well-.known to the editorial staff.
The real gem of the page lay-out is the center page presentation, four columns in length, of a drug for Multiple Sclerosis that appears as the solution to the problem (a mechanism by which false hopes are generated). In this way, after having read the other articles in a state of alarm, the readers is reassured by the absolute central position of the piece on the drug, which is proposed in a decidedly misleading way (there is no certainty that the drug is able to block Multiple Sclerosis, even though the title suggests it as a given fact).
If the main headline of the page had been “Moslem Cardiologist kills patient”, there would have been a totally justified protest to defend Islamic peoples’ right to not be categorized in a group. It’s obvious that the word “Homeopath” is intended to specifically categorize homeopaths, thereby re-confirming the possibility that Corriere della sera has a coordinated “strategic offensive” against natural medicine and homeopathy.
Corriere della sera is clearly free to have its views, and to give information, but it doesn’t have the freedom to pass judgments that are camouflaged as information and that can be harmful to a different school of thought. There are a great number of homeopaths in Italy: 75% of them are also doctors who work with the National Health Service and who are perfectly capable of balancing public and institutional needs with the freedom of thought and conscience that they have developed over time in the medical field. But if you read the calendar, you’ll find that the article was released exactly six months after another ferocious attack on Homeopathy, published last November by the newspaper.
One has the impression that this topic has become a sort of time bomb that has been placed in the editorial plan as an institutional duty or... as an advertisement.
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