After delivering the Encyclopaedia Britannica lecture early in 1974, Ivan Illich has been identified with the paradoxical thesis that "the medical establishment has become a major threat to health." Central to his positjon then (later elaborated in his Medical Nemesis) is the medical establishment's responsibility "for the individual's growing demand for institutional management of his pain." Pain, by becoming uhnecessary, has become unbearable. It seems eminently reasonable then "to eliminate pain, even at the cost of health." So we have become addicted to whatever ambrosia promises that god-like but essentially negative state of being—painlessness.