Summary
An iatrogenic effect is harm caused by the treatment meant to help. The word comes from medicine (‘iatros’ is Greek for physician), where it covers anything from a surgical mistake to the expected side effects of a drug. In the 1970s the social critic Ivan Illich widened it in ‘Medical Nemesis’: beyond clinical harm, he argued, medicine does social and cultural damage by medicalising ordinary life and wearing away people’s own ways of coping with pain, sickness and death.
In campaigning, the term describes work that has an immediate positive impact while also reinforcing the deeper values and ways of understanding reality that maintain harmful systems.
Rationale
The articles don’t use the word, but Part 1 gives cases of it: a campaign praising migrants’ contribution to growth “might reinforce a disposition that sees productivity as the sole determinant of value”.