Depressed, stressed and perpetually sleep-deprived due to work schedules that go far beyond what is permissible, workloads that are impossible to manage. All compounded by lack of recognition of professional value, the number of patients per doctor and beds that makes it almost impossible to establish an empathetic relationship with patients, and the bureaucracy that makes everything even more difficult. There is this and more in what is referred to in technical jargon as "burnout syndrome", that is, the set of symptoms determined by a state of permanent stress with which 52 percent of physicians and 45 percent of nurses working in hospital departments of internal medicine have to live, absorbing, alone, one-fifth of all hospitalizations in Italy. This is a threat to their health but also to that of the patients, since working when in burnout means greatly raising the chances of committing a health error, which in Italy would be about 100,000 a year. This is what emerges from the survey on doctors and nurses "on the verge of a nervous breakdown" conducted by Fadoi, the Federation of Hospital Internist Physicians, on a representative sample of more than two thousand health professionals and presented in Milan at the Federation's 28th National Congress. In total, to declare themselves in "burnout" is 49.6 percent of the sample, but the percentage rises to 52 percent when it comes to doctors, to fall back to 45 percent in the case of nurses. In both cases the incidence is more than double among women, where the difficulty of combining work time with that absorbed by children and family in general remains. However, there is an unprecedented and positive reverse side of the coin, consisting of the large majority of doctors and nurses still gratified by their work and relationship with patients.