Beyond Primum Non Nocere: Therapeutic Injury, Comparative Harm Management, and the Ethics of Modern Medicine
Boris Nikolic · 2026
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Description
Boris Nikolic wrote this ethics essay questioning medicine's oldest motto: first, do no harm. The Latin maxim still stands as a symbol of medical restraint. Yet modern treatment routinely accepts injury on purpose, the author notes. Surgery cuts tissue, chemotherapy poisons the whole body, and burning or blocking tissue is exactly how some procedures cure. Nikolic asks how such deliberate injury fits the old rule, working through classic ethical frameworks, not data.
His answer is that practice no longer runs on literal non-harm. Doctors actually practice comparative harm management, choosing among foreseeable harms under uncertainty. A growing class of treatments harms as its very mechanism, which older frameworks address only sideways. On his account, the motto survives as caution and restraint, not a description of daily work. Physicians are better seen as stewards of proportionate therapeutic injury, weighing benefit against the damage a cure requires.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Boris Nikolic |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 36 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |