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Iatrogenesis is harm caused by medical treatment or personnel, including medical errors, adverse drug effects, misdiagnosis, and surgical errors. It can also be psychological in origin, with patients suffering from symptoms of diseases they don’t have due to diagnostic errors or mistaken beliefs. Iatrogenesis remains a leading cause of disease and death.
Iatrogenesis refers to the damage to health caused by medical treatment or medical personnel. Causes include neglect, improper sanitation, medical errors, inadequate medical procedures, lack of medical information, misdiagnoses, adverse drug effects, and drug interactions. The health problems and symptoms caused by iatrogenesis are called iatrogenic artifacts. Historically, iatrogenesis has been a leading cause of mortality due to doctors’ poor hygiene and their ignorance of the germ theory of medicine. This has been greatly alleviated in modern times, but iatrogenesis remains a leading cause of disease and death.
Some iatrogenesis is the expected but undesirable result of treatment. In the case of drugs, this is referred to as an adverse drug reaction. Many drugs have significant side effects, and some are only effective in doses high enough to be toxic to humans. The chemicals used in chemotherapy are especially harmful to cancer cells, but they also damage healthy tissue, and some are themselves cancerous.
Other adverse drug effects are the result of medical errors. Doctors can prescribe the wrong medications or incorrect dosages. Treating a patient with multiple drugs at once, called polypharmacy, can result in dangerous drug interactions if the doctor and pharmacist are not careful which drugs are given together. Iatrogenic disease can also be caused by poor handwriting, as seen in cases where pharmacists have given patients the wrong medications due to the prescriber’s illegible handwriting.
Iatrogenesis can be caused by the error or negligence of medical professionals in other ways. Misdiagnosis can result in unnecessary medical procedures or giving patients unnecessary medications that could have serious side effects. Iatrogenesis can be caused by surgical errors, such as performing a procedure on the wrong patient, performing a procedure incorrectly, operating on the wrong part of the body, or leaving an object, such as a surgical sponge, inside the patient.
Hospital patients who are left in one position for too long can develop pressure ulcers, better known as pressure sores, which can cause serious injury and lead to life-threatening infections. Medical errors can lead to what is called a cascade effect. This effect occurs when an initial error in diagnosis or treatment causes health problems or the appearance of health problems that lead to additional medical procedures which in turn cause further harm to the patient’s health.
Some iatrogenises are psychological in origin. Just as when the health of a patient given a placebo sometimes improves because of the patient’s belief that the placebo is real medicine, patients may actually suffer from symptoms of diseases and ailments they don’t have because their doctor he convinced that I am afflicted with it due to a diagnostic error. Iatrogenic artefacts also include “diseases” created and diagnosed by physicians that do not actually exist in nature, such as “hysteroepilepsy” and are instead the product of mistaken beliefs about causality or how the body works, or of the cultural environment of the doctor . Due to the power of suggestion, this can lead to seemingly genuine cases of non-existent diseases and ailments.
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