Customer Reviews

Medical Harm: Historical, Conceptual and Ethical Dimensions of Iatrogenic Illness

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For anyone involved in the healing arts, the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) recent report on preventable errors could not have been a surprise. The book MEDICAL HARM...is an excellent and comprehensive look at the subject of iatrogenic illness and injury. It gives some valuable history that makes the IOM report more understandable. This book should be required reading for every health professional, medical and nursing student, hospital administrator and board member.

This is a highly academic exacting discussion of how and why doctors damage some of their patients and the view of the profession of this type of injury. It is very accurate and well researched. It tends toward the end of the spectrum which blames the systems in place in medicine as opposed to the individual responsibility of the doctor. It is an important part of the debate about how to make medicine safer.

I knew I was going to enjoy this book when I found on page three attribution of Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis. This book chronicles the history of iatrogenic illness, which continues and remains inevitable as medicine is practiced in the US.

This is a valuable book, but I was puzzled to find that, although the authors discuss "ritualistic surgery" and "fads," they make no mention of male infant circumcision - an extremely painful, permanently harmful, and medically worthless procedure that has been abandoned (if ever accepted) nearly everywhere in the civilized world. Although they discuss tonsillectomy, now rightly recognized as worthless, they seem almost determined not even to consider whether infant circumcision is an example of what they term "unnecessary surgery." For the information of readers I am an anthropologist with a medical degree and have been conducting research on this subject for more than two years.