More to Illich than overtreatment: his work is relevant as we reflect on pandemic management

Abbasi repeats Ivan Illich’s quote from the 1970s: “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”1 The revival of interest in Illich’s work is welcome, but there is a danger that only the parts endorsed by the medical world get incorporated into the discussion. As David Horrobin pointed out at the time, Illich’s critique of medical practice depended heavily on material produced by the profession itself about unnecessary surgery, inappropriate prescriptions, and treatments that lacked a real evidence base.2The genuine radicalism of Illich’s work lay in the wider questions he raised about the social and cultural damage that resulted from what others were already calling medical imperialism. The management of the covid-19 pandemic in many countries should have reminded us of these concerns. Illich was critical of the way in which biomedicine had promoted the idea that a good society was defined purely by the health of its…
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