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May 29, 2007
Retraction
Sort of. I have just started reading The Rivers North of the Future. It is the last thought of Ivan Illich, written from transcribed conversations, representing his core thinking. In the chapter on health, he comments that iatrogenesis is accepted now as a common occurrence. "If I had to rewrite that book, if I had to say something today, I certainly wouldn't speak anymore about the medical enterprise being the major threat to health. This is now well-known. I would speak rather about the radical change in the attitude of the university-based and university-trained healer during the course of the eighteenth century."
Actually, I am not retracting anything, because I started this study knowing well that iatrogenesis was well-known. And I have been reading a great deal lately about the changes in medicine during the eighteenth (and the nineteenth) century. And I was asked the other day if I had learned anything in the last twenty years about practicing. And my interlocutor commented that he had learned to listen to the patient (which is what Illich says is missing-but which had been partly recovered in Family Practice- though always with the recognition that the patient always lies-okay, maybe not always intentionally).
So as I have begun, so I will continue to explore the nemesis, or really the hubris, of medicine, recognizing that much of this is old hat, but still needs to be eaten.
| By Robert Maddox | 05:39 PM