Taking care of frailty

The postmodern socio-cultural scene creates increasingly systemic frailties (concerning person, family and community) and intrasystemic ones (concerning the whole life and/or the life of all). They become part of the commonly shared experience the removal of deeper personal experiences typical of everyday life, like the disease, the non-accepted declining in the old age (a sense of marginalization), the death. In the framework of constitutional rights, we see the censorship and the removal of one of the three main principles of the western democracies: the brotherhood or solidarity. We have to turn over the perspective, speaking from a human point of view in general and a medical one in particular. We are not talking about curing a body object, but caring a body subject. Cure is not recovery, removing in this way the idea of death, because it is unbearable. We need to remember that disease is always an existential experience, not a merely biological one, and that the lack of likelihood of recovery has not to lead to the absence of the human relationship with the patient. In a wider existential sense, the human being must today leave any claim to be almighty, in order to take a loving care of his own frailty, that is an essential part of his humanity.

Keywords: Frailty, disease, take care, pedagogy

Carlo Maria Mozzanica, Prendersi cura della fragilità in "CHILD DEVELOPMENT & DISABILITIES - SAGGI" 2/2010, pp 50-30, DOI: 10.3280/CDD2010-002001