Iatrogenic trainwrecks and moral injury

Opioids, a set of potent pain medications, have numerous known deleterious side effects, ranging from constipation to respiratory depression and death, and yet they are routinely prescribed and administered in biomedical settings. Situated against the backdrop of the US opioid epidemic, this paper examines how the iatrogenic and inadvertent harms and complications caused by opioid administration in clinical settings are experienced by clinicians as forms of moral injury. 'Moral injury' describes a moral agent's experience of perpetrating or being unable to prevent events that are at odds with their moral beliefs and social expectations. This concept powerfully extends Illich's notion of clinical iatrogenesis, which refers to harms experienced by patients; instead, 'moral injury' indexes forms of harm that extend beyond patients to those providing them care. Using an analytic auto-ethnographic approach based on more than a decade of clinical practice in urban hospitals in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, the authors describe interactions with patients on opioids whose treatment trajectories are fraught with iatrogenic complications, and explore how biomedical institutions and systems further harm vulnerable patients who receive and are addicted to opioids. Though anxious to avoid harming their patients, clinicians are disempowered by hierarchical systems of medical decision-making, which hinder their ability to always act in what they feel are the patient's best interests. This paper highlights the emotional/affective distress and ambivalence experienced by physicians when making decisions about whether to administer or prescribe opioids. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how iatrogenesis and moral injury are concomitantly produced through cascades of decision-making and local health systems, rather than individual clinical decisions alone.