WE NEED PRACTICAL DEGREES

By Charles Micallef

I think Social Wellbeing has gone overboard. Here in Malta, the Social Model has dominated logic and reasoning, politics, and even the hard sciences, namely our biology.

Furthermore, with everyone practically graduating with a Masters we have devalued the true meaning of a Master’s degree. I receive requests to assist students at a Master’s level, and the mere survey or questionnaire they undertake is not even suitable for a diploma in Level 5! At Masters, one should come out with some breakthrough findings.

I come from the pharmacy and public health but I am also a qualified exercise prescriber. I see pharmacists with doctorates in pharmacy, yet they are afraid, reluctant, or restricted from dispensing a common analgesic without a prescription. In other words, the local community is not benefitting because one still needs to see a family doctor for a primary anti-inflammatory pain killer.

And how about getting their hands dirty? The more they are awarded higher degrees, the more they refrain from doing basic duties, thus creating other problems. I saw it with nurses when they started getting degrees. Nurses stopped doing basic jobs, and the Health Sector had to develop ‘lower jobs’ to assist them. We might soon see it with degrees for kinder educators. Will they be more understanding with a poorly toilet-trained three-year-old child?

I cannot resist not mentioning that I tried to promote a new specialization course on exercise as an alternative therapy about ten years ago. This has nothing to do with sports or with physiotherapy. My vision was that people are seeing alternative therapies these days. One can prevent or treat around 30 non-communicable diseases through the correct exercise prescription, which would eventually prove cost-effective, even nationally. I found many currents against this initiative; until now, the University of Malta has not yet offered this course. I had even made arrangements with experts from Middlesex University in this field to come to Malta as visiting lectures, but to no avail. They let me down.

After a decade, I changed my path of studies, and I am the only person in Malta who publishes internationally on transgenderism. Again, I invited the local gender and theology experts from the University of Malta to meet, but they did not even have the guts to reply. Transgenderism is a very timely topic. Not because we have hosted the Europride but because gender-confused adolescents are started on very harmful puberty blockers and cross-sex steroids.

Shame on them!