every time you visit a doctor and get a treatment, you incur risks of such medical harm, which should be analyzed the way we analyze other trade-offs: probabilistic benefits minus probabilistic costs. For a classic example of iatrogenics, consider the death of George Washington in December 1799: we have enough evidence that his doctors greatly helped, or at least hastened, his death, thanks to the then standard treatment that included bloodletting (between five and nine pounds of blood).
