Limits to Medicine

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.

During the past three generations the diseases afflicting Western societies have undergone dramatic changes 1 Polio, diphtheria, and tuberculosis are vanishing; one shot of an antibiotic often cures...

Political Transmission of Iatrogenic Disease # Until recently medicine attempted to enhance what occurs in nature.

id="diagnostic-imperialism">Diagnostic Imperialism# In a medicalized society the influence of physicians extends not only to the purse and the medicine chest but also to the categories to which people

Introduction # We have dealt so far with two ways in which the predominance of medicalized health care becomes an obstacle to a healthy life: first, clinical iatrogenesis, which results when organic...

When cosmopolitan medical civilization colonizes any traditional culture, it transforms the experience of pain 1 The same nervous stimulation that I shall call "pain sensation" will result in a...

The French Revolution gave birth to two great myths: one, that physicians could replace the clergy; the other, that with political change society would return to a state of original health 1 Sickness...

Death as Commodity # In every society the dominant image of death determines the prevalent concept of health 1 Such an image, the culturally conditioned anticipation of a certain event at an...

Iatrogenesis will be controlled only if it is understood as but one aspect of the destructive dominance of industry over society; as but one instance of that paradoxical counterproductivity which is...

Fifteen years ago it would have been impossible to get a hearing for the claim that medicine itself might be a danger to health.

Much suffering has been man-made. The history of man is one long catalogue of enslavement and exploitation, usually told in the epics of conquerors or sung in the elegies of their victims.