devind9bde's review
5.0
Ivan Illich gives new meaning to the expression 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. By challenging the professional status of medicine he threatens a sacred cow of western society.
This book was particularly challenging for me, as a life-long believer in medicine. Upon inspection, however, I find that I already hold many of the ideas that he raises here. This is required reading for anyone interested in personal health, or a career in a health 'profession'.
Quotes:
"Doctor-inflicted pain and infirmity have always been a part of medical practice. Professional callousness, negligence, and sheer incompetence are age-old forms of malpractice. With the transformation of the doctor from an artisan exercising a skill on personally known individuals into a technician applying scientific rules to classes of patients, malpractice acquired an anonymous, almost respectable status."
"Nemesis was the inevitable punishment for attempts to be a hero rather than a human being. Like most abstract Greek nouns, Nemesis took the shape of a divinity. She represented nature's response to hubris: to the individual's presumption in seeking to acquire the attributes of a god."
"...the fundamental reason why these costly bureaucracies are health-denying lies not in their instrumental but in their symbolic function: they all stress delivery of repair and maintenance services for the human component of the megamachine, and criticism that proposes better and more equitable delivery only reinforces the social commitment to keep people at work in sickening jobs."
"The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed."
"Increasingly, pain-killing turns people into unfeeling spectators of their own decaying selves."
"Medical care, industrial safety, health education, and psychic reconditioning are all different names for the human engineering needed to fit populations into engineering systems."
"...our contemporaries refuse to face nemesis because they feel incapable of putting the autonomous rather than the industrial mode of production at the center of their sociopolitial constructs."
"A world of optimal and widespread health is obviously a world of minimal and only occasional medical intervention. Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes, on a healthy diet, in an environment equally fit for birth, growth, work, healing, and dying; they are sustained by a culture that enhances the conscious acceptance of limits to population, of aging, of incomplete recovery and ever-imminent death."
"The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health."
This book was particularly challenging for me, as a life-long believer in medicine. Upon inspection, however, I find that I already hold many of the ideas that he raises here. This is required reading for anyone interested in personal health, or a career in a health 'profession'.
Quotes:
"Doctor-inflicted pain and infirmity have always been a part of medical practice. Professional callousness, negligence, and sheer incompetence are age-old forms of malpractice. With the transformation of the doctor from an artisan exercising a skill on personally known individuals into a technician applying scientific rules to classes of patients, malpractice acquired an anonymous, almost respectable status."
"Nemesis was the inevitable punishment for attempts to be a hero rather than a human being. Like most abstract Greek nouns, Nemesis took the shape of a divinity. She represented nature's response to hubris: to the individual's presumption in seeking to acquire the attributes of a god."
"...the fundamental reason why these costly bureaucracies are health-denying lies not in their instrumental but in their symbolic function: they all stress delivery of repair and maintenance services for the human component of the megamachine, and criticism that proposes better and more equitable delivery only reinforces the social commitment to keep people at work in sickening jobs."
"The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed."
"Increasingly, pain-killing turns people into unfeeling spectators of their own decaying selves."
"Medical care, industrial safety, health education, and psychic reconditioning are all different names for the human engineering needed to fit populations into engineering systems."
"...our contemporaries refuse to face nemesis because they feel incapable of putting the autonomous rather than the industrial mode of production at the center of their sociopolitial constructs."
"A world of optimal and widespread health is obviously a world of minimal and only occasional medical intervention. Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes, on a healthy diet, in an environment equally fit for birth, growth, work, healing, and dying; they are sustained by a culture that enhances the conscious acceptance of limits to population, of aging, of incomplete recovery and ever-imminent death."
"The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health."
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