Past a threshold, institutional or medical intervention produces more harm than the condition it treats.
Illich's 1975 argument in Medical Nemesis. Iatrogenic harm is the clearest case, but he meant it generally — schooling past a threshold produces dependence rather than learning.
In practice
- A school's behaviour policy escalates from monitoring to exclusion, and the excluded pupils' outcomes are worse than the behaviour predicted.
- A performance improvement process designed to help produces a documented file that makes dismissal easier and improvement rarer.