Iatrogenic
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A side-effect. An iatrogenc illness is not one that the cure is worse than, but that the cure actually causes. Popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, one can gleefully extrapolate it to many other walks of life, and service industries. So Night Nurse may causes drowsiness and you shouldn’t drive tractors or operate photocopiers when dosed up, but at least it doesn’t make the head cold you are trying to alleviate worse. Many forms of medical procedure can do this: antibiotics, for example, encourage bacteria to develop resistance to the antibiotics making your original problem harder to solve.
There is a peculiar form of iatrogenic, where, without the (mis)diagnosis, the body would recover and there would be no illness at all. This is why the “six second rule” isn’t quite the careless outrage the helicopter mums of North London imagine. It may be false, but ingesting constant amounts of bacteria - rather than sterilising the whole environment with antibiotics, the body develops its own immunities to the bacteria, so you don’t need antibiotics.
This is rather like insurance. For most purposes, insurance is a waste of money — realistically you are never going to claim on your extended warranty if your Toaster breaks down after 18 months because (a) you can't find it and (b) the damn thing only cost twenty five quid — the bother of having to find your warranty and actually claim on it is more bother than just shelling out twenty five more quid on a new toaster — of a different brand: screw you, Morphy Richards — and being done with it.
But there are insurance policies that, by themselves, increase the likelihood of loss. Public liability insurance, for example.
Against his better judgment the JC is, for reasons that are now too ghastly to recount or even remember, an accredited level 2 ECB cricket coach. As part of the course, which was utterly dismal, we were presented to by the ECB Association of Cricket Officials — I know, right — about the benefits of membership. Now every now and then the JC can come on all a bit misanthropic, and this rainy Saturday afternoon was just such a day.
“Why on God’s barren earth,” he wondered, “would I want to pay money to be in an association with people like you?”
The best answer this fellow could give was, “because you benefit from our public liability insurance policy. That is where the lion’s share of your membership dues go.”
The public liability concerned was that of a coach, out on exercises with his team, when some accident befell one of the delicate little flowers in his charge, which might be attributable to the coach’s carelessness or lack of prudent regard.