[Palliative care: medicine challenged to change skin.].

The spread of palliative care in Italy encountered many difficulties and took place outside - if not despite - the health establishment and medical academia. The lack of a recognized role has conditioned for years the work and lives of the doctors who have dedicated themselves to it. Now the diffusion of palliative care and its institutional acknowledgement have obtained the establishment of specific schools of speciality. This undeniable success involves two important orders of risk, capable of severely limiting if not completely cancelling the value and impact of palliative care: the risk of becoming a marginal part of other medical disciplines much more rooted and organized on the one hand, and the other, the loss of their nature of authentic medical revolution, a new way of being doctors and of taking care of the "unhealed" people, the chronic ills, the elderlies, all the sufferers not necessarily in terminal phase. Crystallizing into a "medical speciality" could undo that paradigm shift that medical art, today more than ever, is in dire need of.