["Abnormal reaction" or cultural misunderstandings? A contribution to the improvement of medical care to children of migrant labourers in the FRG (author's transl)].

The overproportional rate of medical treatment of foreign children in the private practice of paediatricians and in the paediatric hospitals imposes very often special difficulties on our medical care system. These difficulties do not only result from the language barrier but also from the vast difference between the illness concepts of our medical system which bases in natural science, and the traditional concepts of the prescientific medical layman system of the foreign patients. Because of the doctors ignorance in these different cultural forms of understanding, feeling and expression of illness, as well as in the specific attitudes to the body, shown by members--specially women and girls--of the South European an Asia Minor societies, it leads often to deep misunderstandings in the doctor-patient-relation and therefore to false diagnosis and wrong treatment. This should be demonstrated in one case.