The Second Millennium Prize Problem of Management: Iatrogenesis

Key Chunk:

Bad care comes in many forms. Pill mill doctors. Doctors who collaborate with patients in obvious self-diagnosis. Overprescription of pain medication in general. Collaborating with delusional behaviors, such as Munchausen's. Extreme waits for competent physicians. Doctors who refuse to listen to their patients when it is essential that they do. Molestation. Disregard for the patient's comfort. Adverse drug reactions. Surgical mishaps. Botched medical procedures. Inflating costs of procedures. The many different forms of negligent malpractice that can occur when you ignore or disregard a patient. Pushing drugs as an agent of a pharmaceutical corporation. Everything Doctor House does. The list goes on and on.

Not only do these increase administrative and liability burdens for doctors to bear, they also create a class of people who are simply unwilling to participate in the healthcare system without a dire emergency, thus worsening costs and outcomes.

These people come to exist in an oppositional, anti-expertise mode, where they have seen the outcomes of managerial society, and while they may not understand it, they may just blame 'doctors' or 'that doctor' or 'that hospital' or 'insurance companies,' they certainly see that modern medicine is dysfunctional in the extreme. They have no relationship and are unreachable by even well-meaning, scientific, or well-practiced public health interventions.