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- Main article: Side effects (treatment)
The terms iatrogenesis (also iatrogenic effects or iatrogenic artifact) refer to adverse effects or complications caused by or resulting from medical treatment or advice. In addition to harmful consequences of actions by physicians, iatrogenesis can also refer to actions by other healthcare professionals, such as psychologists, therapists, pharmacists, nurses, dentists, and others. Iatrogenisis is not restricted to conventional medicine and can also result from complementary and alternative medicine treatments.
Such effects include:
Some iatrogenic artifacts are clearly defined and easily recognized, such as a complication following a surgical procedure. Some are less obvious and can require significant investigation to identify, such as complex drug interactions. And, some conditions have been described for which it is unknown, unproven or even controversial whether they be iatrogenic or not; this has been encountered particularly with regard to various psychological and chronic pain conditions. Research in these areas is ongoing.
Causes of iatrogenesis include medical error, negligence, and the adverse effects or interactions of prescription drugs. In the United States, 225,000 deaths per year may be iatrogenic, making it the third leading cause of death.
Since the time of Hippocrates, the potential damaging effect of a healer's actions has been recognized. The old mandate "first do no harm" (primum non nocere) is an important clause of medical ethics, and iatrogenic illness or death caused purposefully, or by avoidable error or negligence on the healer's part became a punishable offense in many civilizations.
The transfer of pathogens from the autopsy room to maternity patients, leading to shocking historical mortality rates of puerperal fever at maternity institutions in the 1800s, was a major iatrogenic catastrophe of that time. The infection mechanism was first identified by Ignaz Semmelweis.
With the development of scientific medicine in the 20th century, it could be expected that iatrogenic illness or death would be more easily avoided. Antiseptics, anesthesia, antibiotics, and better surgical techniques have been developed to decrease iatrogenic mortality.
Sources of iatrogenesisEdit
Examples of iatrogenesis:
- medical error, poor prescription handwriting
- negligence or faulty procedures
- prescription drug interaction
- adverse effects of prescription drugs
- over-use of drugs leading to antibiotic resistance in bacteria
- nosocomial infection
- blood transfusion
- harmful emotional distress from the ascription of mental pathology nomenclature for transient personal problems
Medical error and negligenceEdit
Iatrogenic conditions do not necessarily result from medical errors, such as mistakes made in surgery, or the prescription or dispensing of the wrong therapy, such as a drug. In fact, intrinsic and sometimes adverse effects of a medical treatment are iatrogenic; for example, radiation therapy or chemotherapy, due to the needed aggressiveness of the therapeutic agents, frequent effects are hair loss, anemia, vomiting, nausea, brain damage etc. The loss of functions resulting from the required removal of a diseased organ is also considered iatrogenesis, e.g., iatrogenic diabetes brought on by removal of all or part of the pancreas.
In other situations, actual negligence or faulty procedures are involved, such as when drug prescriptions are handwritten by the pharmacotherapist. It has been proved that poor handwriting can lead a pharmacist to dispense the wrong drug, worsening a patient's condition.[How to reference and link to summary or text]
A very common iatrogenic effect is caused by drug interaction, i.e., when pharmacotherapists fail to check for all medications a patient is taking and prescribe new ones which interact agonistically or antagonistically (potentiate or decrease the intended therapeutic effect). Significant morbidity and mortality is caused because of this. Adverse reactions, such as allergic reactions to drugs, even when unexpected by pharmacotherapists, are also classified as iatrogenic.
The evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria is iatrogenic as well.Finland M (1979). Emergence of antibiotic resistance in hospitals, 1935-1975. Rev. Infect. Dis. 1 (1): 4–22. Bacteria strains resistant to antibiotics have evolved in response to the overprescription of antibiotic drugs.
Certain drugs are toxic in their own right in therapeutic doses because of their mechanism of action. Alkylating antineoplastic agents, for example, cause DNA damage, which is more harmful to cancer cells than regular cells. However, alkylation causes severe side effects and is actually carcinogenic in its own right, potentially leading to the development of secondary tumors. Similarly arsenic-based medications like melarsoprol for trypanosomiasis cause arsenic poisoning.
A related term is nosocomial, which refers to an iatrogenic illness due to or acquired during hospital care, such as an infection. Sometimes, hospital staff can be unwitting transmitters of nosocomial infections (in one of such instances, many hospitals have forbidden physicians to use long ties, because they transmitted bacteria from bed to bed when the doctor swept the tie over the patients when bending over them). The most common iatrogenic illness in this realm, however, are nosocomial infections caused by unclean or inadequately sterilized hypodermic needles, surgical instruments, and the use of ungloved hands to perform medical or dental procedures.[How to reference and link to summary or text] For example, a number of hepatitis B and C infections caused by dentists and surgeons on their patients have been documented. One of the most horrid cases of massive death caused in recent times by iatrogenic infection has been reported on several bush hospitals in Zaire and Sudan, where the intensive reuse of poorly sterilized syringes and needles by nurses spread the Ebola virus, probably causing hundreds of deaths.
In psychology, iatrogenesis can occur due to misdiagnosis (including diagnosis with a false condition as was the case of hystero-epilepsy). Conditions hypothesized to be partially or completely iatrogenic include bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, fibromyalgia, somatoform disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, antisocial youths and others though research is equivocal for each condition. The degree of association of any particular condition with iatrogenesis is unclear and in some cases controversial. The over-diagnosis of psychological conditions is due to clinical dependence upon subjective criteria. The assignment of pathological nomenclature is rarely a benign process and can easily rise to the level of emotional iatrogenesis, especially when no alternatives outside of the diagnostic naming process have been considered.[How to reference and link to summary or text]
Incidence and importanceEdit
Iatrogenesis is a major phenomenon, and a severe risk to patients. A study carried out in 1981 more than one-third of illnesses of patients in a university hospital were iatrogenic, nearly one in ten were considered major, and in 2% of the patients, the iatrogenic disorder ended in death. Complications were most strongly associated with exposure to drugs and medications. In another study, the main factors leading to problems were inadequate patient evaluation, lack of monitoring and follow-up, and failure to perform necessary tests.
In the United State alone, recorded deaths per year (2000):
- 12,000—unnecessary surgery
- 7,000—medication errors in hospitals
- 20,000—other errors in hospitals
- 80,000—infections in hospitals
- 106,000—non-error, negative effects of drugs
Based on these figures, 225,000 deaths per year constitutes the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer. Also, there is a wide margin between these numbers of deaths and the next leading cause of death (cerebrovascular disease).
This totals 225,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes. In interpreting these numbers, note the following:
- most data were derived from studies in hospitalized patients.
- the estimates are for deaths only and do not include negative effects that are associated with disability or discomfort.
- the estimates of death due to error are lower than those in the IOM report. If higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000.
- Adverse drug reaction
- Adverse effect (medicine)
- Complication (medicine)
- Medical error
- Patient safety
- Quaternary prevention
- ↑ Kenneth E Loy, My Body, His Temple
- ↑ Fisher-Hoch SP (2005). Lessons from nosocomial viral haemorrhagic fever outbreaks. Br. Med. Bull. 73-74: 123–37.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Spanos, Nicholas P. (1996). Multiple Identities & False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective, American Psychological Association (APA).
- ↑ Pruett Jr, John R., Luby, Joan L. (2004). Recent Advances in Prepubertal Mood Disorders: Phenomenology and Treatment. Curr Opin Psychiatry 17 (1): 31–36.
- ↑ Braun, B.G. (1989). Dissociation: Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 066-069: Iatrophilia and Iatrophobia in the diagnosis and treatment of MPD (Morose Parasitic Dynamism).
- ↑ Hadler, N.M. (1997). Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other iatrogenic diagnostic algorithms. Do some labels escalate illness in vulnerable patients?. Postgrad Med 102 (6): 43.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Abbey, S.E. (1993). Somatization, illness attribution and the sociocultural psychiatry of chronic fatigue syndrome. Ciba Found Symp 173: 238–52.
- ↑ Boscarino, JA (2004). Evaluation of the Iatrogenic Effects of Studying Persons Recently Exposed to a Mass Urban Disaster.
- ↑ Moos, R.H. (2005). Iatrogenic effects of psychosocial interventions for substance use disorders: prevalence , predictors, prevention. Addiction 100 (5): 595–604.
- ↑ Weiss, B., Caron, A.; Ball, S.; Tapp, J.; Johnson, M.; Weisz, J.R. (2005). Iatrogenic effects of group treatment for antisocial youths. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 73 (6): 1036–1044.
- ↑ Kouyanou, K, Pither, CE; Wessely, S (Nov 1997). Iatrogenic factors and chronic pain. Psychosomatic Medicine 59 (6): 597–604.
- ↑ Steel K, Gertman PM, Crescenzi C, Anderson J (1981). Iatrogenic illness on a general medical service at a university hospital. N. Engl. J. Med. 304 (11): 638–42.
- ↑ Weingart SN, Ship AN, Aronson MD (2000). Confidential clinician-reported surveillance of adverse events among medical inpatients. J Gen Intern Med 15 (7): 470–7.
- ↑ Starfield B (2000). Is US health really the best in the world?. JAMA 284 (4): 483–5.
- Valenstein, Elliot S. (1986). Great and desperate cures: the rise and decline of psychosurgery and other radical treatments for mental illness, New York: Basic Books.
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