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.
Thus begins the introduction in Ivan Illich’s 1975 book Limits to Medicine – Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. As with his 1971 book Deschooling Society, a critique of education, this book seemed to create a flurry in its time, generating translations and much public discussion in the pre-Internet age, and all to no effect. I’ve read not much further than that opening paragraph, but was stunned that Illich so accurately described in 1975 the current problems associated with medicine. Forty-five years after it was published, the problems have only gotten worse, and the public now seems less able to cope or comprehend.
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