The achievements in medicine have prolonged life expectancy, defeated a large number of diseases and produced numerous therapeutic successes, designing new scenarios for the treatment of conditions considered incurable until the recent past. Today, this approach is no longer sufficient and is no longer sustainable. Modern medicine must also – and above all – ensure that the human being persists in a condition of health and well-being, preserving national health systems, and possibly containing consequently the social and health expenditure. This is the message launched by 21 experts, university professors from various Italian medical faculties, who met – last May 5 – on the occasion of the conference entitled “Systems medicine – models of integration in clinical practice and new therapeutic solutions”.
During the event, held at the University of Milan with the collaboration of the Who Collaborating center for integrative medicine of the university and the International academy of pysiological regulating medicine (Prm) – Independent medical association promoting person-centered and respectful medicine of human physiology, with the patronage of the Ministry of Health and Fnomceo (National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists) and the non-conditioning support of Guna Spa, the current and future socio-health scenarios that make it necessary definition of a new paradigm of medicine.
“The goal – says Umberto Solimene, director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Integrated Medicine at the University of Milan – was to deepen the innovative value of Systems Medicine which today represents one of the most convincing models in medical interpretation of health and disease. It is also the positive concrete result of an intense long collaboration between institutional scientific structures (universities, hospitals) and private (scientific associations) “.
The rector of the state road Elio Franzini – followed by the institutional greetings of the Lombardy Region Welfare Councilor Letizia Moratti and the Deputy Minister of Health Pierpaolo Sileri – who, in a letter addressed to Solimene, underlined that “there is no doubt that personalized medicine and the concept of personal well-being cannot be separated from integrated and multidisciplinary approaches, in which the concept of health, as the WHO mentions, is declined in all its broadest facets. Because health is made up of the biomedical aspect but also of prevention, wellness, lifestyles for a cure as much as possible focused on the individual needs of the person “.
Systems Medicine – emerged from the conference – proposes an approach where the patient is no longer just a ‘fragmented’ patient, a confluence of various pathologies, but a man in his complexity of body, mind and emotions and an informed and aware subject to devote to personalized care.
“We have gone from a hyperspecialization – says Mario Clerici, professor of Immunology at the University of Milan – in which each doctor took care of a very small part of the patient to a much wider breath in which one realizes that the disease does not it is an apparatus but a system “. Hence the need – it was reiterated – to turn attention to the individual as a whole to cure the disease but also to support his psycho-physical and social balance and well-being.
The approach to Systems Medicine – it was said during the work of the conference – aims to propose a change also at the level of health policy, an opportunity for a rethinking that sees the construction of health models that are not only more efficient but also more economically sustainable . The conference then concluded with the signing by all participating professors of a document, the “Declaration of Milan 2022” which, as underlined by Alessandro Pizzoccaro, president of Guna (an Italian pharmaceutical company specializing in low dose medicine) “wants to represent the foundation stone of this new approach, the way in which to understand medicine today and in the future for a social and health vision that is increasingly attentive to the patient, understood as a man as a whole “.
Among the new objectives of medicine, contained in the ‘Milan Declaration 2022’: the need for new therapies that allow a complex approach to the patient, in which pharmacological interventions (synthetic or of biological or natural origin) and non-pharmacological complementary medicines can harmoniously intervene on the individual and a real and effective transdisciplinary integration. The Milan Declaration 2022 highlights how Systems Medicine is calling for a change also at the level of health policy because the systemic vision of health and disease – the document reads – is now shared by a growing part of the population. An opportunity that health policy must be able to seize in order to promote real health promotion centered on prevention and to activate a rethinking aimed at building health models that are not only more efficient and compliant with the needs of patients, but also more economically sustainable.
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