Too much medicine?Almost certainly

摘要

Most doctors believe medicine to be a force for good. Why else would they have become doctors? Yet while all know medicine's power to harm individual patients and whole populations, presumably few would agree with Ivan Illich that "The medical establishment has become a major threat to health."1 Many might, however, accept the concept of the health economist Alain Enthoven that increasing medical inputs will at some point become counterproductive and produce more harm than good. So where is that point, and might we have reached it already?