Word: illich
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...IVAN ILLICH...
Still, few men take as harsh a view of medicine as Ivan Illich, 51, a Viennese-born priest who now makes his home in Cuernavaca. Mexico. An iconoclast who has already attacked another major institution in his 1971 diatribe Deschooling Society, Illich zeroes in on the health industry in his newest attack and leaves no doubt as to how he regards the target. "The medical establishment," he writes in Medical Nemesis opening sentence, "has become a major threat to health...
...Illich supports his thesis with a recitation of medicine's best-known faults: unnecessary surgery, the unforeseen long-term effects of certain "miracle" drugs, equipment malfunctions, malpractice. However justified, they add little if anything new to the case against modern medicine. Illich's attack is more telling when he takes up the extent to which medicine induces people to forgo control over their own lives in favor of getting as much treatment as they can. Says Illich: "Until proved healthy, the citizen is now presumed to be sick." The result, he points out, is "a morbid society that...
...Illich's diagnosis of medicine's mal ady is correct. But his prescription is both polemical and disappointing. He rejects such political and economic solutions as national health insurance and closer regulation. Instead, he proposes a return to conservatism, a sort of spiritual recognition that suffering is unavoidable in life, a facing up to the inevitability of death as well as the limits of medicine. There is no question that Illich's approach would decrease man's dependence on a medical establishment that already exerts great influence over him. Unfortunately, in the long run it would...
...Although Illich provokes his readers to see the ultimate irrationality of unlimited energy consumption in a fresh perspective, he leaves these two gaping holes in his argument. Indeed, it is not necessarily the visionary's responsibility to show a reasonable means to his end. But the American public will hardly be influenced until the right political leader appears to tell the people just what "the road to liberation from affluence" exactly means in the mid-seventies...