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2014-06-02 03:09:52 UTC
Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (Clinical Iatrogenesis)
Medical Nemesis:
The Expropriation of Health
[Includes acknowledgements, introduction and Part1 - Clinical
Iatrogenesis]
IVAN ILLICH / Random House 1976
Ivan Illich, Pantheon Books, A Division of Random House, New York.
First American Edition. Copyright 1976 by Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Calder & Boyars, Ltd., London. Copyright (c) 1975 by
Ivan Illich. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of
Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-38118 ISBN: 0-394-40225-1
Acknowledgments
My thinking on medical institutions was shaped over several years in
periodic conversations with Roslyn Lindheim and John McKnight. Mrs.
Lindheim, Professor of Architecture at the University of California at
Berkeley, is shortly to publish The Hospitalization of Space, and John
McKnight, Director of Urban Studies at Northwestern University, is
working on The Serviced Society. Without the challenge from these two
friends, I would not have found the courage to develop my last
conversations with Paul Goodman into this book.
Several others have been closely connected with the growth of this
text: Jean Robert and Jean P. Dupuy, who illustrated the economic
thesis stated in this book with examples from time-polluting and space-
distorting transportation systems; André Gorz, who has been my
principal tutor in the politics of health; Marion Boyars, who with
admirable competence published the draft of this book in London and
thus enabled me to base my final version on a wide spectrum of
critical reaction. To them and to all my critics and helpers, and
especially to those who have led me to valuable reading, I owe deep
gratitude.
This book would never have been written without Valentina Borremans.
She has patiently assembled the documentation on which it is based,
and refined my judgment and sobered my language with her constant
criticism. The chapter on the industrialization of death is a summary
of the notes she has assembled for her own book on the history of the
face of death.
IVAN ILLICH
Cuernavaca, Mexico January 1976
Contents
Introduction 3
PART I. Clinical Iatrogenesis
The Epidemics of Modern Medicine 13
Doctors' Effectiveness--an Illusion
Useless Medical Treatment
Doctor-Inflicted Injuries
Defenseless Patients
PART II. Social Iatrogenesis
2. The Medicalization of Life 39
Political Transmission of Iatrogenic Disease
Social Iatrogenesis
Medical Monopoly
Value-Free Cure?
Medicalization of the Budget
The Pharmaceutical Invasion
Diagnostic Imperialism
Preventive Stigma
Terminal Ceremonies
Black Magic
Patient Majorities
vii
PART III. Cultural Iatrogenesis
Introduction 127
3. The Killing of Pain 133
4. The Invention and Elimination of Disease 159
5. Death Against Death 179
Death as Commodity
The Devotional Dance of the Dead
The Danse Macabre
Bourgeois Death
Clinical Death
Trade Union Claims to a Natural Death
Death Under Intensive Care
PART IV. The Politics of Health
6. Specific Counterproductivity 211
7. Political Countermeasures 221
Consumer Protection for Addicts
Equal Access to Torts
Public Controls over the Professional Mafia
The Scientific Organization--of Life
Engineering for a Plastic Womb
8. The Recovery of Health 261
Industrialized Nemesis
From Inherited Myth to Respectful Procedure
The Right to Health
Health as a Virtue
Index 279
About the Author 289
viii
Introduction:
For those considering a respiratory therapist program, nursing
program, or going to medical school, consider the plights that are
currently going on in medicine, as being prepared for what to expect
will make getting the education a lot better.
The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The
disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the
proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new
epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for "physician," and
genesis, meaning "origin." Discussion of the disease of medical
progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences,
researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and
therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for
sickness take up increasing space in medical dope-sheets. The health
professions are on the brink of an unprecedented housecleaning
campaign. "Clubs of Cos," named after the Greek Island of Doctors,
have sprung up here and there, gathering physicians, glorified
druggists, and their industrial sponsors as the Club of Rome has
gathered "analysts" under the aegis of Ford, Fiat, and Volkswagen.
Purveyors of medical services follow the example of their colleagues
in other fields in adding the stick of "limits to growth" to the
carrot of ever more desirable vehicles and therapies. Limits to
professional health care are a rapidly growing political issue. In
whose interest these limits will work will depend to a large extent on
who takes the initiative in formulating the need for them: people
organized for political action that challenges status-quo professional
power, or the health
3
professions intent on expanding their monopoly even further.
The public has been alerted to the perplexity and uncertainty of the
best among its hygienic caretakers. The newspapers are full of reports
on volte-face manipulations of medical leaders: the pioneers of
yesterday's so-called breakthroughs warn their patients against the
dangers of the miracle cures they have only just invented. Politicians
who have proposed the emulation of the Russian, Swedish, or English
models of socialized medicine are embarrassed that recent events show
their pet systems to be highly efficient in producing the same
pathogenic--that is, sickening--cures and care that capitalist medicine,
albeit with less equal access, produces. A crisis of confidence in
modern medicine is upon us. Merely to insist on it would be to
contribute further to a self-fulfilling prophecy, and to possible
panic.
This book argues that panic is out of place. Thoughtful public
discussion of the iatrogenic pandemic, beginning with an insistence
upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to
the commonweal. Indeed, what is dangerous is a passive public that has
come to rely on superficial medical housecleanings. The crisis in
medicine could allow the layman effectively to reclaim his own control
over medical perception, classification, and decision-making. The
laicization of the Aesculapian temple could lead to a delegitimizing
of the basic religious tenets of modern medicine to which industrial
societies, from the left to the right, now subscribe.
My argument is that the layman and not the physician has the potential
perspective and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic
epidemic. This book offers the lay reader a conceptual framework
within which to assess the seamy side of progress against its more
publicized benefits.
4
It uses a model of social assessment of technological progress that I
have spelled out elsewhere' and applied previously to education2 and
transportation,3 and that I now apply to the criticism of the
professional monopoly and of the scientism in health care that prevail
in all nations that have organized for high levels of
industrialization. In my opinion, the sanitation of medicine is part
and parcel of the socio-economic inversion with which Part IV of this
book deals.
The footnotes reflect the nature of this text. I assert the right to
break the monopoly that academia has exercised over all small print at
the bottom of the page. Some footnotes document the information I have
used to elaborate and to verify my own preconceived paradigm for
optimally limited health care, a perspective that did not necessarily
have any place within the mind of the person who collected the
corresponding data. Occasionally, I quote my source only as an
eyewitness account that is incidentally offered by the expert author,
while refusing to accept what he says as expert testimony on the
grounds that it is hearsay and therefore ought not to influence the
relevant public decisions.
Many more footnotes provide the reader with the kind of
bibliographical guidance that I would have appreciated when I first
began, as an outsider, to delve into the subject of health care and
tried to acquire competence in the political evaluation of medicine's
effectiveness. These notes refer to library tools and reference works
that I have learned to appreciate in years of single-handed
exploration. They also list readings, from technical monographs to
novels, that have been of use to me.
Finally, I have used the footnotes to deal with my own
_______________________________________________
1 Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
2 Deschooling Society, Ruth N. Anshen, ed. (New York: Harper & Row,
1971).
3 Energy and Equity (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
parenthetical, supplementary, and tangential suggestions and
questions, which would have distracted the reader if kept in the main
text. The layman in medicine, for whom this book is written, will
himself have to acquire the competence to evaluate the impact of
medicine on health care. Among all our contemporary experts,
physicians are those trained to the highest level of specialized
incompetence for this urgently needed pursuit.
The recovery from society-wide iatrogenic disease is a political task,
not a professional one. It must be based on a grassroots consensus
about the balance between the civil liberty to heal and the civil
right to equitable health care. During the last generations the
medical monopoly over health care has expanded without checks and has
encroached on our liberty with regard to our own bodies. Society has
transferred to physicians the exclusive right to determine what
constitutes sickness, who is or might become sick, and what shall be
done to such people. Deviance is now "legitimate" only when it merits
and ultimately justifies medical interpretation and intervention. The
social commitment to provide all citizens with almost unlimited
outputs from the medical system threatens to destroy the environmental
and cultural conditions needed by people to live a life of constant
autonomous healing. This trend must be recognized and eventually be
reversed.
Limits to medicine must be something other than professional self-
limitation. I will demonstrate that the insistence of the medical
guild on its unique qualifications to cure medicine itself is based on
an illusion. Professional power is the result of a political
delegation of autonomous authority to the health occupations which was
enacted during our century by other sectors of the university-trained
bourgeoisie: it cannot now be revoked by those who conceded it; it can
only be delegitimized by popular
6
agreement about the malignancy of this power. The self-medication of
the medical system cannot but fail. If a public, panicked by gory
revelations, were browbeaten into further support for more expert
control over experts in health-care production, this would only
intensify sickening care. It must now be understood that what has
turned health care into a sick-making enterprise is the very intensity
of an engineering endeavor that has translated human survival from the
performance of organisms into the result of technical manipulation.
"Health," after all, is simply an everyday word that is used to
designate the intensity with which individuals cope with their
internal states and their environmental conditions. In Homo sapiens,
"healthy" is an adjective that qualifies ethical and political
actions. In part at least, the health of a population depends on the
way in which political actions condition the milieu and create those
circumstances that favor self-reliance, autonomy, and dignity for all,
particularly the weaker. In consequence, health levels will be at
their optimum when the environ-ment brings out autonomous personal,
responsible coping ability. Health levels can only decline when
survival comes to depend beyond a certain point on the heteronomous
(other-directed) regulation of the organism's homeostasis. Beyond a
critical level of intensity, institutional health care--no matter if it
takes the form of cure, prevention, or environmental engineering--is
equivalent to systematic health denial.
The threat which current medicine represents to the health of
populations is analogous to the threat which the volume and intensity
of traffic represent to mobility, the threat which education and the
media represent to learning, and the threat which urbanization
represents to competence in homemaking. In each case a major
institutional endeavor has turned counterproductive. Time-con-
7
suming acceleration in traffic, noisy and confusing communications,
education that trains ever more people for ever higher levels of
technical competence and specialized forms of generalized
incompetence: these are all phenomena parallel to the production by
medicine of iatrogenic disease. In each case a major institutional
sector has removed society from the specific purpose for which that
sector was created and technically instrumented.
Iatrogenesis cannot be understood unless it is seen as the
specifically medical manifestation of specfic counterproductivity.
Specific or paradoxical counterproductivity is a negative social
indicator for a diseconomy which remains locked within the system that
produces it. It is a measure of the confusion delivered by the news
media, the incompetence fostered by educators, or the time-loss
represented by a more powerful car. Specific counterproductivity is an
unwanted side-effect of increasing institutional outputs that remains
internal to the system which itself originated the specific value. It
is a social measure for objective frustration. This study of
pathogenic medicine was under-taken in order to illustrate in the
health-care field the various aspects of counterproductivity that can
be observed in all major sectors of industrial society in its present
stage. A similar analysis could be undertaken in other fields of
industrial production, but the urgency in the field of medicine, a
traditionally revered and self-congratulatory service profession, is
particularly great.
Built-in iatrogenesis now affects all social relations. It is the
result of internalized colonization of liberty by affluence. In rich
countries medical colonization has reached sickening proportions; poor
countries are quickly following suit. (The siren of one ambulance can
destroy Samaritan attitudes in a whole Chilean town.) This process,
which I shall call the "medicalization of life," deserves articulate
political recognition. Medicine could
8
become a prime target for political action that aims at an inversion
of industrial society. Only people who have recovered the ability for
mutual self-care and have learned to combine it with dependence on the
application of contemporary technology will be ready to limit the
industrial mode of production in other major areas as well.
A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown
beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce
clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but
enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render
society unhealthy; and it tends to mystify and to expropriate the
power of the individual to heal himself and to shape his or her
environment. Contemporary medical systems have outgrown these
tolerable bounds. The medical and paramedical monopoly over hygienic
methodology and technology is a glaring example of the political
misuse of scientific achievement to strengthen industrial rather than
personal growth. Such medicine is but a device to convince those who
are sick and tired of society that it is they who are ill, impotent,
and in need of technical repair. I will deal with these three levels
of sickening medical impact in the first three parts of this book.
The balance sheet of achievement in medical technology will be drawn
up in the first chapter. Many people are already apprehensive about
doctors, hospitals, and the drug industry and only need data to
substantiate their misgivings. Doctors already find it necessary to
bolster their credibility by demanding that many treatments now common
be formally outlawed. Restrictions on medical performance which
professionals have come to consider mandatory are often so radical
that they are not accept-able to the majority of politicians. The lack
of effectiveness of costly and high-risk medicine is a now widely
discussed fact from which I start, not a key issue I want to dwell on.
9
Part II deals with the directly health-denying effects of medicine's
social organization, and Part III with the disabling impact of medical
ideology on personal stamina: under three separate headings I describe
the transformation of pain, impairment, and death from a personal
challenge into a technical problem.
Part IV interprets health-denying medicine as typical of the
counterproductivity of overindustrialized civilization and analyzes
five types of political response which constitute tactically useful
remedies that are all strategically futile. It distinguishes between
two modes in which the person relates and adapts to his environment:
autonomous (i.e., self-governing) coping and heteronomous (i.e., ad-
ministered) maintenance and management. It concludes by demonstrating
that only a political program aimed at the limitation of professional
management of health will enable people to recover their powers for
health care, and that such a program is integral to a society-wide
criticism and restraint of the industrial mode of production.
10
PART I
Clinical Iatrogenesis
1
The Epidemics
of Modern Medicine
During the past three generations the diseases afflicting Western
societies have undergone dramatic changes.' Polio, diphtheria, and
tuberculosis are vanishing; one shot of an antibiotic often cures
pneumonia or syphilis; and so many mass killers have come under
control that two-thirds of all deaths are now associated with the
diseases of old age. Those who die young are more often than not
victims of accidents, violence, or suicide.2
These changes in health status are generally equated with a decrease
in suffering and attributed to more or to better medical care.
Although almost everyone believes that at least one of his friends
would not be alive and well except for the skill of a doctor, there is
in fact no evidence of any direct relationship between this mutation
of sickness and the so-called progress of medicine.3 The changes are
13
dependent variables of political and technological trans-formations,
which in turn are reflected in what doctors do and say; they are not
significantly related to the activities that require the preparation,
status, and costly equipment in which the health professions take
pride.4 In addition, an expanding proportion of the new burden of
disease of the last fifteen years is itself the result of medical
intervention in favor of people who are or might become sick. It is
doctor-made, or iatrogenic.5
After a century of pursuit of medical utopia,6 and contrary to current
conventional wisdom,7 medical services
14
have not been important in producing the changes in life expectancy
that have occurred. A vast amount of contemporary clinical care is
incidental to the curing of disease, but the damage done by medicine
to the health of individuals and populations is very significant.
These facts are obvious, well documented, and well repressed.
Doctors' Effectiveness--An Illusion
The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides evidence that
during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more
profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and
went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified
any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than
by those customary at religious shrines.8 Discussion of the future of
health care might usefully begin with the recognition of this fact.
The infections that prevailed at the outset of the industrial age
illustrate how medicine came by its reputation.9 Tuberculosis, for
instance, reached a peak over two generations. In New York in 1812,
the death rate was estimated to be higher than 700 per 10,000; by
1882, when Koch first isolated and cultured the bacillus, it had
already declined to 370 per 10,000. The rate was down to 180 when the
first sanatorium was opened in 1910, even though "consumption" still
held second place in the mortality tables.10 After World War II, but
before antibi-
15
otics became routine, it had slipped into eleventh place with a rate
of 48. Cholera," dysentery,12 and typhoid similarly peaked and
dwindled outside the physician's control. By the time their etiology
was understood and their therapy had become specific, these diseases
had lost much of their virulence and hence their social importance.
The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping
cough, and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90
percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had
occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread
immunization.13 In part this recession may be attributed to improved
housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by
far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to
better nutrition. In poor countries today, diarrhea and upper-
respiratory-tract infections occur more frequently, last longer, and
lead to higher mortality where nutrition is poor, no matter how much
or how little medical care is available.14 In England, by the middle
of the nineteenth century, infectious epidemics had been replaced by
major malnutrition syndromes, such as rickets and pellagra. These in
turn peaked and vanished, to be replaced by the diseases of early
childhood and, somewhat later, by an increase in duodenal ulcers in
16
young men. When these declined, the modern epidemics took over:
coronary heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, obesity, hypertension,
cancer (especially of the lungs), arthritis, diabetes, and so-called
mental disorders. Despite intensive research, we have no complete
explanation for the genesis of these changes.15 But two things are
certain: the professional practice of physicians cannot be credited
with the elimination of old forms of mortality or morbidity, nor
should it be blamed for the increased expectancy of life spent in
suffering from the new diseases. For more than a century, analysis of
disease trends has shown that the environment is the primary
determinant of the state of general health of any population.16
Medical geography,17
17
the history of diseases,18 medical anthropology,19 and the social
history of attitudes towards illness20 have shown that food,21 water,
22 and air,23 in correlation with the level of
sociopolitical equality24 and the cultural mechanisms that make it
possible to keep the population stable,25 play the
19
decisive role in determining how healthy grown-ups feel and at what
age adults tend to die. As the older causes of disease recede, a new
kind of malnutrition is becoming the most rapidly expanding modern
epidemic.26 One-third of humanity survives on a level of
undernourishment which would formerly have been lethal, while more and
more rich people absorb ever greater amounts of poisons and mutagens
in their food.27
Some modern techniques, often developed with the help of doctors, and
optimally effective when they become part of the culture and
environment or when they are applied independently of professional
delivery, have also effected changes in general health, but to a
lesser degree. Among these can be included contraception, smallpox
vaccination of infants, and such nonmedical health measures as the
treatment of water and sewage, the use of soap and scissors by
midwives, and some antibacterial and insecticidal procedures. The
importance of many of these practices was first recognized and stated
by doctors--often courageous dissidents who suffered for their
recommendations28
20
--but this does not consign soap, pincers, vaccination needles,
delousing preparations, or condoms to the category of "medical
equipment." The most recent shifts in mortality from younger to older
groups can be explained by the incorporation of these procedures and
devices into the layman's culture.
In contrast to environmental improvements and modern nonprofessional
health measures, the specifically medical treatment of people is never
significantly related to a decline in the compound disease burden or
to a rise in life expectancy.29 Neither the proportion of doctors in a
population nor the clinical tools at their disposal nor the number of
hospital beds is a causal factor in the striking changes in over-all
patterns of disease. The new techniques for recognizing and treating
such conditions as pernicious anemia and hypertension, or for
correcting congenital malformations by surgical intervention, re-
define but do not reduce morbidity. The fact that the doctor
population is higher where certain diseases have become rare has
little to do with the doctors' ability to control or eliminate them.30
It simply means that doctors
21
deploy themselves as they like, more so than other professionals, and
that they tend to gather where the climate is healthy, where the water
is clean, and where people are employed and can pay for their services.
31
Useless Medical Treatment
Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian
rhetoric to create the impression that contemporary medicine is highly
effective. Undoubtedly, during the last generation, a limited number
of specific procedures have become extremely useful. But where they
are not monopolized by professionals as tools of their trade, those
which are applicable to widespread diseases are usually very
inexpensive and require a minimum of personal skills, materials, and
custodial services from hospitals. In contrast, most of today's
skyrocketing medical expenditures are destined for the__ kind_ of
diagnosis and treatment whose effectiveness at best doubtful.32 To
make this point I will distinguish between infectious and
noninfectious diseases.
In the case of infectious diseases, chemotherapy has played a
significant role in the control of pneumonia, gonorrhea, and syphilis.
Death from pneumonia, once the "old man's friend," declined yearly by
5 to 8 percent after sulphonamides and antibiotics came on the market.
Syphilis, yaws, and many cases of malaria and typhoid can be cured
quickly and easily. The rising rate of venereal
22
disease is due to new mores, not to ineffectual medicine. The
reappearance of malaria is due to the development of pesticide-
resistant mosquitoes and not to any lack of new antimalarial drugs.33
Immunization has almost wiped out paralytic poliomyelitis, a disease
of developed countries, and vaccines have certainly contributed to the
decline of whooping cough and measles,34 thus seeming to confirm the
popular belief in "medical progress." 35 But for most other
infections, medicine can show no comparable results. Drug treatment
has helped to reduce mortality from tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria,
and scarlet fever, but in the total decline of mortality or morbidity
from these diseases, chemotherapy played a minor and possibly
insignificant role.36 Malaria, leishmaniasis, and sleeping sickness
indeed receded for a time under the onslaught of chemical attack, but
are now on the rise again.37
23
The effectiveness of medical intervention in combatting noninfectious
diseases is even more questionable. In some situations and for some
conditions, effective progress has indeed been demonstrated: the
partial prevention of caries through fluoridation of water is
possible, though at a cost not fully understood.38 Replacement therapy
lessens the direct impact of diabetes, though only in the short run.39
Through intravenous feeding, blood transfusions, and surgical
techniques, more of those who get to the hospital survive trauma, but
survival rates for the most common types of cancer--those which make up
90 percent of the cases--have remained virtually unchanged over the
last twenty-five years. This fact has consistently been clouded by
announcements from the American Cancer Society reminiscent of General
Westmoreland's proclamations from Vietnam. On the other hand, the
diagnostic value of the Papanicolaou vaginal smear test has been
proved: if the tests are given four times a year, early intervention
for cervical cancer demonstrably increases the five-year survival
rate. Some skin-cancer treatment is highly effective. But there is
little evidence of effective treatment of most other cancers.40 The
five-year survival rate in breast-can-
24
cer cases is 50 percent, regardless of the frequency of medical check-
ups and regardless of the treatment used.41 Nor is there evidence that
the rate differs from that among untreated women. Although practicing
doctors and the publicists of the medical establishment stress the
importance of early detection and treatment of this and several other
types of cancer, epidemiologists have begun to doubt that early
intervention can alter the rate of survival.42 Surgery and
chemotherapy for rare congenital and rheumatic heart disease have
increased the chances for an active life for some of those who suffer
from degenerative conditions.43 The medical treatment of common
cardiovascular disease44 and the intensive treatment of heart
25
disease,45 however, are effective only when rather exceptional
circumstances combine that are outside the physician's control. The
drug treatment of high blood pressure is effective and warrants the
risk of side-effects in the few in whom it is a malignant condition;
it represents a considerable risk of serious harm, far outweighing any
proven benefit, for the 10 to 20 million Americans on whom rash artery-
plumbers are trying to foist it.46
Doctor-Inflicted Injuries
Unfortunately, futile but otherwise harmless medical care is the least
important of the damages a proliferating medical enterprise inflicts
on contemporary society. The pain, dysfunction, disability, and
anguish resulting from technical medical intervention now rival the
morbidity due to traffic and industrial accidents and even war-related
activities, and make the impact of medicine one of the most rapidly
spreading epidemics of our time. Among murderous institutional torts,
only modern malnutrition injures more people than iatrogenic disease
in its various manifestations.47 In the most narrow sense, iatrogenic
disease includes only illnesses that would not have come
26
about if sound and professionally recommended treatment had not been
applied.48 Within this definition, a patient could sue his therapist
if the latter, in the course of his management, failed to apply a
recommended treatment that, in the physician's opinion, would have
risked making him sick. In a more general and more widely accepted
sense, clinical iatrogenic disease comprises all clinical conditions
for which remedies, physicians, or hospitals are the pathogens, or
"sickening" agents. I will call this plethora of therapeutic side-
effects clinical iatrogenesis. They are as old as medicine itself,49
and have always been a subject of medical studies.50
Medicines have always been potentially poisonous, but their unwanted
side-effects have increased with their power51 and widespread use.52
Every twenty-four to thirty-
27
six hours, from 50 to 80 percent of adults in the United States and
the United Kingdom swallow a medically prescribed chemical. Some take
the wrong drug; others get an old or a contaminated batch, and others
a counterfeit;53 others take several drugs in dangerous combinations;
54 and still others receive injections with improperly sterilized
syringes.55 Some drugs are addictive, others mutilating, and others
mutagenic, although perhaps only in combination with food coloring or
insecticides. In some patients, antibiotics alter the normal bacterial
flora and induce a superinfection, permitting more resistant organisms
to proliferate and invade the host. Other drugs contribute to the
breeding of drug-resistant strains of bacteria.56 Subtle kinds of
poisoning thus have spread even faster than the bewildering variety
and ubiquity of nostrums.57 Unnecessary surgery is a standard
procedure.58 Disabling nondiseases
28
result from the medical treatment of nonexistent diseases and are on
the increase:59 the number of children disabled in Massachusetts
through the treatment of cardiac non-disease exceeds the number of
children under effective treatment for real cardiac disease.60
Doctor-inflicted pain and infirmity have always been a part of medical
practice.61 Professional callousness, negli-
29
gence, and sheer incompetence are age-old forms of malpractice.62 With
the transformation of the doctor from an artisan exercising a skill on
personally known individuals into a technician applying scientific
rules to classes of patients, malpractice acquired an anonymous,
almost respectable status.63 What had formerly been considered an
abuse of confidence and a moral fault can now be rationalized into the
occasional breakdown of equipment and operators. In a complex
technological hospital, negligence becomes "random human error" or
"system break-down," callousness becomes "scientific detachment," and
incompetence becomes "a lack of specialized equipment." The
depersonalization of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice
from an ethical into a technical problem.64
loss of the master's income during his protracted sickness. Citizens
were not covered by these statutes, but could avenge malpractice on
their own initiative.
30
In 1971, between 12,000 and 15,000 malpractice suits were lodged in
United States courts. Less than half of all malpractice claims were
settled in less than eighteen months, and more than 10 percent of such
claims remain unsettled for over six years. Between sixteen and twenty
percent of every dollar paid in malpractice insurance went to
compensate the victim; the rest was paid to lawyers and medical
experts.65 In such cases, doctors are vulnerable only to the charge of
having acted against the medical code, of the incompetent performance
of prescribed treatment, or of dereliction out of greed or laziness.
The problem, however, is that most of the damage inflicted by the
modern doctor does not fall into any of these categories.66 It occurs
in the ordinary practice of well-trained men and women who have
learned to bow to prevailing professional judgment and procedure, even
though they know (or could and should know) what damage they do.
The United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
calculates that 7 percent of all patients suffer compensable injuries
while hospitalized, though few of them do anything about it. Moreover,
the frequency of reported accidents in hospitals is higher than in all
industries but mines and high-rise construction. Accidents are the
major cause of death in American children.
Read More:
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Medical-Nemesis-Illich1976.htm
Medical Nemesis:
The Expropriation of Health
[Includes acknowledgements, introduction and Part1 - Clinical
Iatrogenesis]
IVAN ILLICH / Random House 1976
Ivan Illich, Pantheon Books, A Division of Random House, New York.
First American Edition. Copyright 1976 by Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Calder & Boyars, Ltd., London. Copyright (c) 1975 by
Ivan Illich. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of
Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-38118 ISBN: 0-394-40225-1
Acknowledgments
My thinking on medical institutions was shaped over several years in
periodic conversations with Roslyn Lindheim and John McKnight. Mrs.
Lindheim, Professor of Architecture at the University of California at
Berkeley, is shortly to publish The Hospitalization of Space, and John
McKnight, Director of Urban Studies at Northwestern University, is
working on The Serviced Society. Without the challenge from these two
friends, I would not have found the courage to develop my last
conversations with Paul Goodman into this book.
Several others have been closely connected with the growth of this
text: Jean Robert and Jean P. Dupuy, who illustrated the economic
thesis stated in this book with examples from time-polluting and space-
distorting transportation systems; André Gorz, who has been my
principal tutor in the politics of health; Marion Boyars, who with
admirable competence published the draft of this book in London and
thus enabled me to base my final version on a wide spectrum of
critical reaction. To them and to all my critics and helpers, and
especially to those who have led me to valuable reading, I owe deep
gratitude.
This book would never have been written without Valentina Borremans.
She has patiently assembled the documentation on which it is based,
and refined my judgment and sobered my language with her constant
criticism. The chapter on the industrialization of death is a summary
of the notes she has assembled for her own book on the history of the
face of death.
IVAN ILLICH
Cuernavaca, Mexico January 1976
Contents
Introduction 3
PART I. Clinical Iatrogenesis
The Epidemics of Modern Medicine 13
Doctors' Effectiveness--an Illusion
Useless Medical Treatment
Doctor-Inflicted Injuries
Defenseless Patients
PART II. Social Iatrogenesis
2. The Medicalization of Life 39
Political Transmission of Iatrogenic Disease
Social Iatrogenesis
Medical Monopoly
Value-Free Cure?
Medicalization of the Budget
The Pharmaceutical Invasion
Diagnostic Imperialism
Preventive Stigma
Terminal Ceremonies
Black Magic
Patient Majorities
vii
PART III. Cultural Iatrogenesis
Introduction 127
3. The Killing of Pain 133
4. The Invention and Elimination of Disease 159
5. Death Against Death 179
Death as Commodity
The Devotional Dance of the Dead
The Danse Macabre
Bourgeois Death
Clinical Death
Trade Union Claims to a Natural Death
Death Under Intensive Care
PART IV. The Politics of Health
6. Specific Counterproductivity 211
7. Political Countermeasures 221
Consumer Protection for Addicts
Equal Access to Torts
Public Controls over the Professional Mafia
The Scientific Organization--of Life
Engineering for a Plastic Womb
8. The Recovery of Health 261
Industrialized Nemesis
From Inherited Myth to Respectful Procedure
The Right to Health
Health as a Virtue
Index 279
About the Author 289
viii
Introduction:
For those considering a respiratory therapist program, nursing
program, or going to medical school, consider the plights that are
currently going on in medicine, as being prepared for what to expect
will make getting the education a lot better.
The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The
disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the
proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new
epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for "physician," and
genesis, meaning "origin." Discussion of the disease of medical
progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences,
researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and
therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for
sickness take up increasing space in medical dope-sheets. The health
professions are on the brink of an unprecedented housecleaning
campaign. "Clubs of Cos," named after the Greek Island of Doctors,
have sprung up here and there, gathering physicians, glorified
druggists, and their industrial sponsors as the Club of Rome has
gathered "analysts" under the aegis of Ford, Fiat, and Volkswagen.
Purveyors of medical services follow the example of their colleagues
in other fields in adding the stick of "limits to growth" to the
carrot of ever more desirable vehicles and therapies. Limits to
professional health care are a rapidly growing political issue. In
whose interest these limits will work will depend to a large extent on
who takes the initiative in formulating the need for them: people
organized for political action that challenges status-quo professional
power, or the health
3
professions intent on expanding their monopoly even further.
The public has been alerted to the perplexity and uncertainty of the
best among its hygienic caretakers. The newspapers are full of reports
on volte-face manipulations of medical leaders: the pioneers of
yesterday's so-called breakthroughs warn their patients against the
dangers of the miracle cures they have only just invented. Politicians
who have proposed the emulation of the Russian, Swedish, or English
models of socialized medicine are embarrassed that recent events show
their pet systems to be highly efficient in producing the same
pathogenic--that is, sickening--cures and care that capitalist medicine,
albeit with less equal access, produces. A crisis of confidence in
modern medicine is upon us. Merely to insist on it would be to
contribute further to a self-fulfilling prophecy, and to possible
panic.
This book argues that panic is out of place. Thoughtful public
discussion of the iatrogenic pandemic, beginning with an insistence
upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to
the commonweal. Indeed, what is dangerous is a passive public that has
come to rely on superficial medical housecleanings. The crisis in
medicine could allow the layman effectively to reclaim his own control
over medical perception, classification, and decision-making. The
laicization of the Aesculapian temple could lead to a delegitimizing
of the basic religious tenets of modern medicine to which industrial
societies, from the left to the right, now subscribe.
My argument is that the layman and not the physician has the potential
perspective and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic
epidemic. This book offers the lay reader a conceptual framework
within which to assess the seamy side of progress against its more
publicized benefits.
4
It uses a model of social assessment of technological progress that I
have spelled out elsewhere' and applied previously to education2 and
transportation,3 and that I now apply to the criticism of the
professional monopoly and of the scientism in health care that prevail
in all nations that have organized for high levels of
industrialization. In my opinion, the sanitation of medicine is part
and parcel of the socio-economic inversion with which Part IV of this
book deals.
The footnotes reflect the nature of this text. I assert the right to
break the monopoly that academia has exercised over all small print at
the bottom of the page. Some footnotes document the information I have
used to elaborate and to verify my own preconceived paradigm for
optimally limited health care, a perspective that did not necessarily
have any place within the mind of the person who collected the
corresponding data. Occasionally, I quote my source only as an
eyewitness account that is incidentally offered by the expert author,
while refusing to accept what he says as expert testimony on the
grounds that it is hearsay and therefore ought not to influence the
relevant public decisions.
Many more footnotes provide the reader with the kind of
bibliographical guidance that I would have appreciated when I first
began, as an outsider, to delve into the subject of health care and
tried to acquire competence in the political evaluation of medicine's
effectiveness. These notes refer to library tools and reference works
that I have learned to appreciate in years of single-handed
exploration. They also list readings, from technical monographs to
novels, that have been of use to me.
Finally, I have used the footnotes to deal with my own
_______________________________________________
1 Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
2 Deschooling Society, Ruth N. Anshen, ed. (New York: Harper & Row,
1971).
3 Energy and Equity (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
parenthetical, supplementary, and tangential suggestions and
questions, which would have distracted the reader if kept in the main
text. The layman in medicine, for whom this book is written, will
himself have to acquire the competence to evaluate the impact of
medicine on health care. Among all our contemporary experts,
physicians are those trained to the highest level of specialized
incompetence for this urgently needed pursuit.
The recovery from society-wide iatrogenic disease is a political task,
not a professional one. It must be based on a grassroots consensus
about the balance between the civil liberty to heal and the civil
right to equitable health care. During the last generations the
medical monopoly over health care has expanded without checks and has
encroached on our liberty with regard to our own bodies. Society has
transferred to physicians the exclusive right to determine what
constitutes sickness, who is or might become sick, and what shall be
done to such people. Deviance is now "legitimate" only when it merits
and ultimately justifies medical interpretation and intervention. The
social commitment to provide all citizens with almost unlimited
outputs from the medical system threatens to destroy the environmental
and cultural conditions needed by people to live a life of constant
autonomous healing. This trend must be recognized and eventually be
reversed.
Limits to medicine must be something other than professional self-
limitation. I will demonstrate that the insistence of the medical
guild on its unique qualifications to cure medicine itself is based on
an illusion. Professional power is the result of a political
delegation of autonomous authority to the health occupations which was
enacted during our century by other sectors of the university-trained
bourgeoisie: it cannot now be revoked by those who conceded it; it can
only be delegitimized by popular
6
agreement about the malignancy of this power. The self-medication of
the medical system cannot but fail. If a public, panicked by gory
revelations, were browbeaten into further support for more expert
control over experts in health-care production, this would only
intensify sickening care. It must now be understood that what has
turned health care into a sick-making enterprise is the very intensity
of an engineering endeavor that has translated human survival from the
performance of organisms into the result of technical manipulation.
"Health," after all, is simply an everyday word that is used to
designate the intensity with which individuals cope with their
internal states and their environmental conditions. In Homo sapiens,
"healthy" is an adjective that qualifies ethical and political
actions. In part at least, the health of a population depends on the
way in which political actions condition the milieu and create those
circumstances that favor self-reliance, autonomy, and dignity for all,
particularly the weaker. In consequence, health levels will be at
their optimum when the environ-ment brings out autonomous personal,
responsible coping ability. Health levels can only decline when
survival comes to depend beyond a certain point on the heteronomous
(other-directed) regulation of the organism's homeostasis. Beyond a
critical level of intensity, institutional health care--no matter if it
takes the form of cure, prevention, or environmental engineering--is
equivalent to systematic health denial.
The threat which current medicine represents to the health of
populations is analogous to the threat which the volume and intensity
of traffic represent to mobility, the threat which education and the
media represent to learning, and the threat which urbanization
represents to competence in homemaking. In each case a major
institutional endeavor has turned counterproductive. Time-con-
7
suming acceleration in traffic, noisy and confusing communications,
education that trains ever more people for ever higher levels of
technical competence and specialized forms of generalized
incompetence: these are all phenomena parallel to the production by
medicine of iatrogenic disease. In each case a major institutional
sector has removed society from the specific purpose for which that
sector was created and technically instrumented.
Iatrogenesis cannot be understood unless it is seen as the
specifically medical manifestation of specfic counterproductivity.
Specific or paradoxical counterproductivity is a negative social
indicator for a diseconomy which remains locked within the system that
produces it. It is a measure of the confusion delivered by the news
media, the incompetence fostered by educators, or the time-loss
represented by a more powerful car. Specific counterproductivity is an
unwanted side-effect of increasing institutional outputs that remains
internal to the system which itself originated the specific value. It
is a social measure for objective frustration. This study of
pathogenic medicine was under-taken in order to illustrate in the
health-care field the various aspects of counterproductivity that can
be observed in all major sectors of industrial society in its present
stage. A similar analysis could be undertaken in other fields of
industrial production, but the urgency in the field of medicine, a
traditionally revered and self-congratulatory service profession, is
particularly great.
Built-in iatrogenesis now affects all social relations. It is the
result of internalized colonization of liberty by affluence. In rich
countries medical colonization has reached sickening proportions; poor
countries are quickly following suit. (The siren of one ambulance can
destroy Samaritan attitudes in a whole Chilean town.) This process,
which I shall call the "medicalization of life," deserves articulate
political recognition. Medicine could
8
become a prime target for political action that aims at an inversion
of industrial society. Only people who have recovered the ability for
mutual self-care and have learned to combine it with dependence on the
application of contemporary technology will be ready to limit the
industrial mode of production in other major areas as well.
A professional and physician-based health-care system that has grown
beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce
clinical damage that outweighs its potential benefits; it cannot but
enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render
society unhealthy; and it tends to mystify and to expropriate the
power of the individual to heal himself and to shape his or her
environment. Contemporary medical systems have outgrown these
tolerable bounds. The medical and paramedical monopoly over hygienic
methodology and technology is a glaring example of the political
misuse of scientific achievement to strengthen industrial rather than
personal growth. Such medicine is but a device to convince those who
are sick and tired of society that it is they who are ill, impotent,
and in need of technical repair. I will deal with these three levels
of sickening medical impact in the first three parts of this book.
The balance sheet of achievement in medical technology will be drawn
up in the first chapter. Many people are already apprehensive about
doctors, hospitals, and the drug industry and only need data to
substantiate their misgivings. Doctors already find it necessary to
bolster their credibility by demanding that many treatments now common
be formally outlawed. Restrictions on medical performance which
professionals have come to consider mandatory are often so radical
that they are not accept-able to the majority of politicians. The lack
of effectiveness of costly and high-risk medicine is a now widely
discussed fact from which I start, not a key issue I want to dwell on.
9
Part II deals with the directly health-denying effects of medicine's
social organization, and Part III with the disabling impact of medical
ideology on personal stamina: under three separate headings I describe
the transformation of pain, impairment, and death from a personal
challenge into a technical problem.
Part IV interprets health-denying medicine as typical of the
counterproductivity of overindustrialized civilization and analyzes
five types of political response which constitute tactically useful
remedies that are all strategically futile. It distinguishes between
two modes in which the person relates and adapts to his environment:
autonomous (i.e., self-governing) coping and heteronomous (i.e., ad-
ministered) maintenance and management. It concludes by demonstrating
that only a political program aimed at the limitation of professional
management of health will enable people to recover their powers for
health care, and that such a program is integral to a society-wide
criticism and restraint of the industrial mode of production.
10
PART I
Clinical Iatrogenesis
1
The Epidemics
of Modern Medicine
During the past three generations the diseases afflicting Western
societies have undergone dramatic changes.' Polio, diphtheria, and
tuberculosis are vanishing; one shot of an antibiotic often cures
pneumonia or syphilis; and so many mass killers have come under
control that two-thirds of all deaths are now associated with the
diseases of old age. Those who die young are more often than not
victims of accidents, violence, or suicide.2
These changes in health status are generally equated with a decrease
in suffering and attributed to more or to better medical care.
Although almost everyone believes that at least one of his friends
would not be alive and well except for the skill of a doctor, there is
in fact no evidence of any direct relationship between this mutation
of sickness and the so-called progress of medicine.3 The changes are
13
dependent variables of political and technological trans-formations,
which in turn are reflected in what doctors do and say; they are not
significantly related to the activities that require the preparation,
status, and costly equipment in which the health professions take
pride.4 In addition, an expanding proportion of the new burden of
disease of the last fifteen years is itself the result of medical
intervention in favor of people who are or might become sick. It is
doctor-made, or iatrogenic.5
After a century of pursuit of medical utopia,6 and contrary to current
conventional wisdom,7 medical services
14
have not been important in producing the changes in life expectancy
that have occurred. A vast amount of contemporary clinical care is
incidental to the curing of disease, but the damage done by medicine
to the health of individuals and populations is very significant.
These facts are obvious, well documented, and well repressed.
Doctors' Effectiveness--An Illusion
The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides evidence that
during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more
profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and
went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified
any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than
by those customary at religious shrines.8 Discussion of the future of
health care might usefully begin with the recognition of this fact.
The infections that prevailed at the outset of the industrial age
illustrate how medicine came by its reputation.9 Tuberculosis, for
instance, reached a peak over two generations. In New York in 1812,
the death rate was estimated to be higher than 700 per 10,000; by
1882, when Koch first isolated and cultured the bacillus, it had
already declined to 370 per 10,000. The rate was down to 180 when the
first sanatorium was opened in 1910, even though "consumption" still
held second place in the mortality tables.10 After World War II, but
before antibi-
15
otics became routine, it had slipped into eleventh place with a rate
of 48. Cholera," dysentery,12 and typhoid similarly peaked and
dwindled outside the physician's control. By the time their etiology
was understood and their therapy had become specific, these diseases
had lost much of their virulence and hence their social importance.
The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping
cough, and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90
percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had
occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread
immunization.13 In part this recession may be attributed to improved
housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by
far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to
better nutrition. In poor countries today, diarrhea and upper-
respiratory-tract infections occur more frequently, last longer, and
lead to higher mortality where nutrition is poor, no matter how much
or how little medical care is available.14 In England, by the middle
of the nineteenth century, infectious epidemics had been replaced by
major malnutrition syndromes, such as rickets and pellagra. These in
turn peaked and vanished, to be replaced by the diseases of early
childhood and, somewhat later, by an increase in duodenal ulcers in
16
young men. When these declined, the modern epidemics took over:
coronary heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, obesity, hypertension,
cancer (especially of the lungs), arthritis, diabetes, and so-called
mental disorders. Despite intensive research, we have no complete
explanation for the genesis of these changes.15 But two things are
certain: the professional practice of physicians cannot be credited
with the elimination of old forms of mortality or morbidity, nor
should it be blamed for the increased expectancy of life spent in
suffering from the new diseases. For more than a century, analysis of
disease trends has shown that the environment is the primary
determinant of the state of general health of any population.16
Medical geography,17
17
the history of diseases,18 medical anthropology,19 and the social
history of attitudes towards illness20 have shown that food,21 water,
22 and air,23 in correlation with the level of
sociopolitical equality24 and the cultural mechanisms that make it
possible to keep the population stable,25 play the
19
decisive role in determining how healthy grown-ups feel and at what
age adults tend to die. As the older causes of disease recede, a new
kind of malnutrition is becoming the most rapidly expanding modern
epidemic.26 One-third of humanity survives on a level of
undernourishment which would formerly have been lethal, while more and
more rich people absorb ever greater amounts of poisons and mutagens
in their food.27
Some modern techniques, often developed with the help of doctors, and
optimally effective when they become part of the culture and
environment or when they are applied independently of professional
delivery, have also effected changes in general health, but to a
lesser degree. Among these can be included contraception, smallpox
vaccination of infants, and such nonmedical health measures as the
treatment of water and sewage, the use of soap and scissors by
midwives, and some antibacterial and insecticidal procedures. The
importance of many of these practices was first recognized and stated
by doctors--often courageous dissidents who suffered for their
recommendations28
20
--but this does not consign soap, pincers, vaccination needles,
delousing preparations, or condoms to the category of "medical
equipment." The most recent shifts in mortality from younger to older
groups can be explained by the incorporation of these procedures and
devices into the layman's culture.
In contrast to environmental improvements and modern nonprofessional
health measures, the specifically medical treatment of people is never
significantly related to a decline in the compound disease burden or
to a rise in life expectancy.29 Neither the proportion of doctors in a
population nor the clinical tools at their disposal nor the number of
hospital beds is a causal factor in the striking changes in over-all
patterns of disease. The new techniques for recognizing and treating
such conditions as pernicious anemia and hypertension, or for
correcting congenital malformations by surgical intervention, re-
define but do not reduce morbidity. The fact that the doctor
population is higher where certain diseases have become rare has
little to do with the doctors' ability to control or eliminate them.30
It simply means that doctors
21
deploy themselves as they like, more so than other professionals, and
that they tend to gather where the climate is healthy, where the water
is clean, and where people are employed and can pay for their services.
31
Useless Medical Treatment
Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian
rhetoric to create the impression that contemporary medicine is highly
effective. Undoubtedly, during the last generation, a limited number
of specific procedures have become extremely useful. But where they
are not monopolized by professionals as tools of their trade, those
which are applicable to widespread diseases are usually very
inexpensive and require a minimum of personal skills, materials, and
custodial services from hospitals. In contrast, most of today's
skyrocketing medical expenditures are destined for the__ kind_ of
diagnosis and treatment whose effectiveness at best doubtful.32 To
make this point I will distinguish between infectious and
noninfectious diseases.
In the case of infectious diseases, chemotherapy has played a
significant role in the control of pneumonia, gonorrhea, and syphilis.
Death from pneumonia, once the "old man's friend," declined yearly by
5 to 8 percent after sulphonamides and antibiotics came on the market.
Syphilis, yaws, and many cases of malaria and typhoid can be cured
quickly and easily. The rising rate of venereal
22
disease is due to new mores, not to ineffectual medicine. The
reappearance of malaria is due to the development of pesticide-
resistant mosquitoes and not to any lack of new antimalarial drugs.33
Immunization has almost wiped out paralytic poliomyelitis, a disease
of developed countries, and vaccines have certainly contributed to the
decline of whooping cough and measles,34 thus seeming to confirm the
popular belief in "medical progress." 35 But for most other
infections, medicine can show no comparable results. Drug treatment
has helped to reduce mortality from tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria,
and scarlet fever, but in the total decline of mortality or morbidity
from these diseases, chemotherapy played a minor and possibly
insignificant role.36 Malaria, leishmaniasis, and sleeping sickness
indeed receded for a time under the onslaught of chemical attack, but
are now on the rise again.37
23
The effectiveness of medical intervention in combatting noninfectious
diseases is even more questionable. In some situations and for some
conditions, effective progress has indeed been demonstrated: the
partial prevention of caries through fluoridation of water is
possible, though at a cost not fully understood.38 Replacement therapy
lessens the direct impact of diabetes, though only in the short run.39
Through intravenous feeding, blood transfusions, and surgical
techniques, more of those who get to the hospital survive trauma, but
survival rates for the most common types of cancer--those which make up
90 percent of the cases--have remained virtually unchanged over the
last twenty-five years. This fact has consistently been clouded by
announcements from the American Cancer Society reminiscent of General
Westmoreland's proclamations from Vietnam. On the other hand, the
diagnostic value of the Papanicolaou vaginal smear test has been
proved: if the tests are given four times a year, early intervention
for cervical cancer demonstrably increases the five-year survival
rate. Some skin-cancer treatment is highly effective. But there is
little evidence of effective treatment of most other cancers.40 The
five-year survival rate in breast-can-
24
cer cases is 50 percent, regardless of the frequency of medical check-
ups and regardless of the treatment used.41 Nor is there evidence that
the rate differs from that among untreated women. Although practicing
doctors and the publicists of the medical establishment stress the
importance of early detection and treatment of this and several other
types of cancer, epidemiologists have begun to doubt that early
intervention can alter the rate of survival.42 Surgery and
chemotherapy for rare congenital and rheumatic heart disease have
increased the chances for an active life for some of those who suffer
from degenerative conditions.43 The medical treatment of common
cardiovascular disease44 and the intensive treatment of heart
25
disease,45 however, are effective only when rather exceptional
circumstances combine that are outside the physician's control. The
drug treatment of high blood pressure is effective and warrants the
risk of side-effects in the few in whom it is a malignant condition;
it represents a considerable risk of serious harm, far outweighing any
proven benefit, for the 10 to 20 million Americans on whom rash artery-
plumbers are trying to foist it.46
Doctor-Inflicted Injuries
Unfortunately, futile but otherwise harmless medical care is the least
important of the damages a proliferating medical enterprise inflicts
on contemporary society. The pain, dysfunction, disability, and
anguish resulting from technical medical intervention now rival the
morbidity due to traffic and industrial accidents and even war-related
activities, and make the impact of medicine one of the most rapidly
spreading epidemics of our time. Among murderous institutional torts,
only modern malnutrition injures more people than iatrogenic disease
in its various manifestations.47 In the most narrow sense, iatrogenic
disease includes only illnesses that would not have come
26
about if sound and professionally recommended treatment had not been
applied.48 Within this definition, a patient could sue his therapist
if the latter, in the course of his management, failed to apply a
recommended treatment that, in the physician's opinion, would have
risked making him sick. In a more general and more widely accepted
sense, clinical iatrogenic disease comprises all clinical conditions
for which remedies, physicians, or hospitals are the pathogens, or
"sickening" agents. I will call this plethora of therapeutic side-
effects clinical iatrogenesis. They are as old as medicine itself,49
and have always been a subject of medical studies.50
Medicines have always been potentially poisonous, but their unwanted
side-effects have increased with their power51 and widespread use.52
Every twenty-four to thirty-
27
six hours, from 50 to 80 percent of adults in the United States and
the United Kingdom swallow a medically prescribed chemical. Some take
the wrong drug; others get an old or a contaminated batch, and others
a counterfeit;53 others take several drugs in dangerous combinations;
54 and still others receive injections with improperly sterilized
syringes.55 Some drugs are addictive, others mutilating, and others
mutagenic, although perhaps only in combination with food coloring or
insecticides. In some patients, antibiotics alter the normal bacterial
flora and induce a superinfection, permitting more resistant organisms
to proliferate and invade the host. Other drugs contribute to the
breeding of drug-resistant strains of bacteria.56 Subtle kinds of
poisoning thus have spread even faster than the bewildering variety
and ubiquity of nostrums.57 Unnecessary surgery is a standard
procedure.58 Disabling nondiseases
28
result from the medical treatment of nonexistent diseases and are on
the increase:59 the number of children disabled in Massachusetts
through the treatment of cardiac non-disease exceeds the number of
children under effective treatment for real cardiac disease.60
Doctor-inflicted pain and infirmity have always been a part of medical
practice.61 Professional callousness, negli-
29
gence, and sheer incompetence are age-old forms of malpractice.62 With
the transformation of the doctor from an artisan exercising a skill on
personally known individuals into a technician applying scientific
rules to classes of patients, malpractice acquired an anonymous,
almost respectable status.63 What had formerly been considered an
abuse of confidence and a moral fault can now be rationalized into the
occasional breakdown of equipment and operators. In a complex
technological hospital, negligence becomes "random human error" or
"system break-down," callousness becomes "scientific detachment," and
incompetence becomes "a lack of specialized equipment." The
depersonalization of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice
from an ethical into a technical problem.64
loss of the master's income during his protracted sickness. Citizens
were not covered by these statutes, but could avenge malpractice on
their own initiative.
30
In 1971, between 12,000 and 15,000 malpractice suits were lodged in
United States courts. Less than half of all malpractice claims were
settled in less than eighteen months, and more than 10 percent of such
claims remain unsettled for over six years. Between sixteen and twenty
percent of every dollar paid in malpractice insurance went to
compensate the victim; the rest was paid to lawyers and medical
experts.65 In such cases, doctors are vulnerable only to the charge of
having acted against the medical code, of the incompetent performance
of prescribed treatment, or of dereliction out of greed or laziness.
The problem, however, is that most of the damage inflicted by the
modern doctor does not fall into any of these categories.66 It occurs
in the ordinary practice of well-trained men and women who have
learned to bow to prevailing professional judgment and procedure, even
though they know (or could and should know) what damage they do.
The United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
calculates that 7 percent of all patients suffer compensable injuries
while hospitalized, though few of them do anything about it. Moreover,
the frequency of reported accidents in hospitals is higher than in all
industries but mines and high-rise construction. Accidents are the
major cause of death in American children.
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