ABSTRACT
Hippocrates enunciated the precautionary principle for medicine in 400 B.C. when he said, “Primum, non nocere” (“First, do no harm”). All physicians are taught that precautionary rule in medical school. Hippocrates’ advice might have worked well to safeguard patient safety in his time, when doctors could not do much for (or to) patients, but medical treatment is very different now. Much has changed over the past five decades in particular, driven by technological advance, and health care has become far more sophisticated, complex, and potentially dangerous to patients than it ever was before. At roughly the same time, health sector oversight has been evolving away from the professional self-regulation and laissez-faire regulatory mindset of much of the past, when the precautionary principle seemed superfluous because the risks of medical intervention were all but invisible outside the profession.
