Medicine: The Dangerous Doctors

Doctors seldom mention the fact that an illness can be iatrogenic, i.e., caused by the doctor.* Yet many forms of sickness are created or made worse by the doctor's own emotional shortcomings. So says Psychiatrist Franklin Gessford Ebaugh of Denver in the Journal of the Michigan State Medical Society.

Usually, says Dr. Ebaugh, expanding earlier reports by a colleague, Dr. Frank R. Drake (TIME, March 15, 1948), such illnesses result from the doctor's failure to recognize or treat the emotional factors in the case. The doctor may be too busy looking for possible physical and mechanical causes: "Not infrequently some innocent anomaly...

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