The aim of this article is the study of the cultural misunderstanding in care relationships, beginning from the analysis of the misunderstanding effects on physician-immigrant patient relations, for example the therapy interruption, the incomprehensibility of symptoms. The western medical model tends to be based on objective data, which can be diagnosed through increasingly precise and detailed techniques, but it excludes the human and cultural aspects from care relationships. This exclusion produces distance, which is increased by both the absence of a cultural homogeneity and the presence of different languages and different body, health and illness concepts between physician and patient. Through the presentation of some clinical examples, this contribution shows how the specialized competence, although is effective in many afflictive situations, elicits grey areas of incomprehensibility, misunderstanding and misconception that, if not recognized, organize care relationships, which are ineffective in their transformative value. The reading of the misunderstanding phenomenon in the health field delimits the observation view to the illness, the care, the relationship between physician and patient, but the identification and the understanding of the misunderstanding is possible also directing the attention both to the organizational and institutional environment in which the misunderstanding develops and to the subjects cultural models.

Keywords: cultural misunderstanding, care relationships, cultural models