The crown of teammates and opponents protecting Edoardo Bove from the prying gaze of the cameras and the entire stadium at the moment of his illness says what is needed in that moment of fear, of tension, of physical suffering: a little respect.
Then, however, in the anxiety to know, understandable for a public person, for a young and strong boy like an athlete should always be, the need to be informed and the duty to inform grows. How are you? Will he be able to play again? When? We understand the emotionality of those who participate, the desire to know, the rush to find out out of danger above all. But is there a limit to the invasion? In Bove’s case we know that the rescue efforts worked properly, that the Fiorentina footballer, resuscitated, recovered already in the ambulance, that he is in intensive care as a precaution, that he will soon be moved to cardiology for analyzes and tests on the case. Do you need anything else? Maybe not. This could be enough, given that privacy in terms of health also applies to public people, to respond to information needs.
And instead for some time now every time a public person makes known a pathology by choice or by destiny, in addition to the social looting that calls into question a multitude of suspicions devoid of any connection with reality, from doping to vaccines, there is a in-depth discussions with experts, not involved in the case, in which every detail is explored of the pathology in question, as if the man in the street needed to see the medical records, to know the details of the tests, to know the percentages of poor prognosis.
Something that probably hurts the person involved, who perhaps scrolls through social media to pass the time in hospital and who, alongside the messages of solidarity – which in Bove’s case were many – finds himself fed to the public, stripped beyond the skin in front of the world.
For sure it is a method that can also indirectly hurt many people who, in a moment of fragility, find themselves exposed to the famous in spite of themselves, simply because they suffer from similar pathologies and perhaps while trying to get out of it they have no desire to see themselves hit back every minute in face all the risks, all the details, all the things that perhaps they would like to escape by reading a newspaper or scrolling through an information site.
It’s not about hiding, but about finding the right balance between information and pornography of pain, without forgetting that health requires above all respect and courtesy. It is not a law that can rigidly set the threshold: it’s just a matter of putting yourself in the shoes of those who are suffering at that moment and of their family and asking yourself – as operators and recipients of information – what you would like for yourself taking the place of the interested party on the one hand, and on the other taking into account the fact that among the recipients of that information there are other people who suffer and their families and that an excess of details could indirectly harm them too.
