Italian laws in regard to occupational diseases provide for compensation of "biological damage" defined as "Injuries to the physical and mental integrity of a person, that can be subject to medico-legal investigation regardless of whether these injuries impair that person's ability to earn an income". When the disability is greater than 16%, this person receives a compensation calculated with a system of coefficients based on the economic value of a percentage point of biological damage and injury on the performance of work. This paper is critical of this approach because it assumes that income from work is directly related to biological damage only, while in fact these effects on daily living can be quite different, and less severe than those on work capacity itself.