Medical Nemesis

Seamus O’Mahony, a gastroenterologist from Cork, has written the most devastating critique of modern medicine since Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis in 1975. O’Mahony cites Illich and argues that many of his warnings of the medicalisation of life and death; runaway costs; ever declining value; patients reduced to consumers; growing empires of doctors, other health workers, and researchers; and the industrialisation of healthcare have come true. There is a widespread feeling that medicine has lost its way, and Can Medicine Be Cured? The Corruption of Medicine, which has been published this month, describes the loss. The book is as readable as O’Mahony’s last book The Way We Die Now, and the book provides a strange cocktail of pleasure and despair.
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