Iatrogenic

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A side-effect. An iatrogenic illness is not one that the cure is worse than, but that the cure actually causes.

So, Night Nurse™ may cause drowsiness and you shouldn’t drive tractors or operate photocopiers when dosed up on it, but at least it doesn’t make your head cold 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. Antibiotics are, in this way, iatrogenic. Long term, they make your problem worse.

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 allowing dear little Basil to ingest constant, small, amounts of bacteria — rather than nuking young sir’s entire theatre of operations with Dettol before he lays as much as a sticky finger on it — encourages his antifragile body to develop its own immunities to the bacteria, so you don’t need so much Dettol. This is cheaper, too.

Popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, one can extrapolate iatrogenics to many other walks of life, in particular those involving service industries, and it is rather fun to do so.

Insurance

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 the stupid warranty, read it — there is guaranteed to be some exclusion — 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. Directors’ and officers’ liability insurance.

See also

• Insurance
• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by the perennially entertaining Nassim Nicholas Taleb