Some considerations are made about "bad medicine": a set of individual and collective phenomena regarding the usual disharmony, dissatisfaction and disappointment experienced by sick people in the doctor-patient relationship. The purpose is to contribute to a better understanding of such "bad medicine", taking its complexity into account, and also to collaborate with its improvement. We disagree with the common sense that summarizes such failed encounters as "bad medical practice". We argue that some of its typical aspects, such as authoritarianism, arrogance, coldness, excessive control, belligerency, and the feelings of omnipotence and omniscience of so many physicians are intertwined with historical-epistemological, social-political and sub-cultural factors of these professionals; for instance, the political victory of Science and its ethnocentrism, biomedicine's official monopoly of cure, the current expansion of the biomechanical paradigm, the authoritarian culture in the hospital setting, the unquestioned adoption of a scientific prejudice against non-science, among others, besides wider and more complex processes like social medicalization.
Medicine; Physician-patient relations; Professional misconduct; Sociology; Anthropology