Today's new word is IATROGENIC

This word entered the English language in the 1920s and the short version is that it means "physician induced," as in iatrogenic illness or iatrogenic disease. IATRO means physician. However, it started out meaning the distress a patient has from an incorrect diagnosis. Now it's much broader, according to an article in MedSurg Nursing June 2001. Today's meaning includes nosocomial infections in hospitals, adverse drug effects, reactions from anaesthesia, complications from surgery, errors in diagnostic tests, mistakes by nursing staff, misdiagnosis--really, just about any error caused by a human that can happen in a medical setting. It's the drive behind your doctor's office to computerize your records (it would be my bet that this could really mess things up, but what do I know), and lots of law suits. I tried to find some recent statistics that didn't have huge ranges or weren't guesses by groups with conflicts of interest (everyone sites a 1999 study), or surveys of patients, but the CDC reports just hospital infections as 1.7 million infections and 99,000 associated deaths each year, so if you add up all the other iatrogenic illnesses, you begin to see the problem. Here's a list of some nasty bugs you can pick up just by being hospitalized. You can check the mortality rate for hospitals in your zip code here.