Concept
Iatrogenesis
Overview
Iatrogenesis is the causation of a disease, a harmful complication, or other ill effect by any medical activity, including diagnosis, intervention, error, or negligence. First used in this sense in 1924, the term was introduced to sociology in 1976 by Ivan Illich, alleging that industrialized societies impair quality of life by overmedicalizing life. Iatrogenesis may thus include mental suffering via medical beliefs or a practitioner's statements. Some iatrogenic events are obvious, like amputation of the wrong limb, whereas others, like drug interactions, can evade recognition. In a 2013 estimate, about 20 million negative effects from treatment had occurred globally. In 2013, an estimated 142,000 persons died from adverse effects of medical treatment, up from an estimated 94,000 in 1990.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In regard to general events, the dates of origin and commencement are many and various; for all general events cannot be traced to one origin, neither is their origin always considered by means of the matter subjected to their operation, for it may be also established by circumstances occurring in the Ambient and presenting the causation. It may, in fact, almost be said that they all originate in eminent eclipses of…
Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos
States what Iatrogenesis is.
If man was to judge of causes by their effects, there would be no small causes in the universe. In a Nature where every thing is connected, where every thing acts and re-acts, moves and changes, composes and decomposes, forms and destroys, there is not an atom which does not play an important part--that does not occupy a necessary station; there is not an imperceptible particle, however minute, which, placed in…
Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
States what Iatrogenesis is.
Lastly, when the soul employs itself in didactic pursuits and logomachies, publicly as well as in private, through a certain ambitious strife, it then inflames the body and dissolves its constitution, and by introducing distillations of humours, deceives the great part of those who are called physicians, inducing them to consider these effects as proceeding from contrary causes.
Plato, The works of Plato
States what Iatrogenesis is.
Related ideas
- Evidence-based medicine
- Greek language
- Hippocrates
- Transaction Publishers
- Medication
- Antibiotic
- Bioethics
- Encyclopedia.com
- Robert K. Merton
- Merriam-Webster
- Brain injury
- Death
- Medical error
Place in the tradition
Part of Medical ethics.