Giorgio Diakantonis: The family doctor who quit his job exasperated by competition from Dr. Google

Giorgio Diakantonis , 37 years old, from Imola, is a good family doctor , who inherited his vocation for this complex but beautiful profession from his mother (also a doctor), who threw in the towel, leaving without a point of reference for approximately 700 patients that she followed, day after day, in the Emilian city area.

With this gesture, Diakantonis becomes a symbol of how in Italy, in the swamp of the National Health Service, the passion and talent of good doctors can be wasted, to the detriment, first and foremost, of the community of people they serve.

But what drove Giorgio to such a dramatic move? When did he feel he couldn't take it anymore and decide to quit? Two things exasperated him, one more serious than the other. The first is the constant competition from Dr. Google : the increasingly widespread habit of people turning to Google for diagnosis and even treatment for any disease, even serious and difficult-to-treat ones. This habit is constantly growing, partly due to the boom in Artificial Intelligence, which allows us to ask direct and specific questions, even about complex and delicate conditions (How is diabetes treated ? What are the treatments for obesity ?) and ensures that patients arrive at their family doctor with ready-made answers. Sometimes they're completely wrong, to the point that the doctor has to try, wasting precious time that would otherwise be taken away from a normal visit, to dismantle them, and it's not a given that he succeeds.

But Giorgio Diakantonis's leadership has also fallen because of the treatment of National Health Service doctors, partly due to the complicity of a corporatist union incapable of defending the work of doctors working in the community. Corriere della Sera writes about Diakantonis's situation: "The new national collective agreement introducing the so-called 'single role' for general practitioners represents the latest blow to the profession. This reform, which came into force in 2024, requires new family doctors to simultaneously provide outpatient care to their patients and ongoing care services, such as on-call medical services, for a total of thirty-eight hours per week that can be managed by local health authorities. The system, designed to meet the needs of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and the creation of Community Houses, has effectively upended the traditional organization of community medicine, creating uncertainty and resistance among professionals."

Many colleagues and the residents of Imola themselves tried, in unison, to convince Giorgio not to give up. But it was to no avail. And his response was very clear: "Being a general practitioner under these conditions has become completely pointless."

Cover image source: Corriere della Sera

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