“First, do no harm.”
Although this admonition never appears verbatim in the Hippocratic oath—a classic translation states that healers of the sick “abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous”—most of today’s health care professionals take these words to heart. They avoid harm by examining and diagnosing patients before proceeding to a treatment.
Unfortunately, a lot of us fail to adopt this same “do no harm” strategy when ministering to others. We saw a classic example of this failure during the COVID-19 pandemic, when governments and regulatory agencies mandated lockdowns, masks, and vaccines to beat the virus but neglected to consider the fallout from these policies: the damage done to children by months-long school closures or the terrible wounds inflicted on the economy, for example. These “physicians” treated the disease but not the patient….