Xenophobe's Guide to the Italians

Health

The most common Italian illness is hypochondria. Italians are in general fairly healthy people who spend a great deal of their time thinking that they should feel healthier than they do. This is partly because they imagine that everyone else feels better than they do, and partly because they have absurd expectations about their own health. They worry constantly about it. Could that stomach ache be the beginnings of a peptic ulcer (forgetting that they ate too much the night before). Might that headache be the beginnings of a brain tumour? (forgetting that they drank too much the night before).

Italians are always eager to tell friends and neighbours about their preoccupations at length, so that animated exchange you witness as you pass may as well be about piles as politics. The recipient may not be quite so happy to be targeted, and when health bores have run out of friends and neighbours they may be obliged to button-hole any available stranger.

People are happy to spend vast sums of money servicing their hypochondria. If their doctor tells them they are in the pink of health, they will go to a private specialist. If this specialist finds nothing wrong, they will go to another one, and so on, until they find a doctor who is prepared to prescribe for them. The prescription will then be taken to the local chemist and discussed at length, before the medicine is bought (and one or two others that the chemist has recommended as well; after all, you never know…). Consequently, the typical Italian bathroom cupboard is crammed with as many medicines as most dispensaries, most of them years beyond their expiry date.

Problems can occur when Italians are genuinely ill. They have already exhausted their doctor’s patience and precious time, and they have already visited half the specialists in town. One possible solution is the hospital Casualty Department. But is that ingrowing toenail a serious enough ailment? Or might the hospital surgeon remove the wrong toenail in his zeal?

Italian news reports are full of hospital horror stories, like the one about the Franciscan friar who went into hospital for a hernia operation and came out with only half his trachea. Or the footballer who had the wrong knee operated on. Despite the fact that there is little real evidence of Italian hospitals being any better or worse than those of other European countries, Italians will often travel to Switzerland or France for treatment, in the unshakeable belief that hospitals function better elsewhere.

Most Italians look wonderfully fit and healthy, until they open their mouths. Dental treatment in Italy is very expensive and, unfortunately for them but fortunately for their dentists, Italians tend to wait until they have serious problems with their teeth before making an appointment. They treat their teeth as they do their ancient monuments, waiting until they are almost beyond repair rather than investing in continuous maintenance. Why bother to do a temporary fixing when you could wait until there is a really big job to be done?