intervention
Pluralinterventions
- 1The act of stepping into a course of events to affect what happens, especially to stop or change it.
The dispute was settled only after the intervention of a neutral mediator.
Government intervention in the housing market sparked fierce debate.
Similarinvolvement, interference, intercession, mediation, interposition
Oppositeinaction
Note
The general sense, and the one the others narrow: borrowed from Middle French intervention, from Latin interventiō, and built in English as intervene plus -tion. It works both as a mass noun (government intervention) and as a count noun (a timely intervention), usually followed by in or of. Sports reporting uses it for a defender's decisive act, as when Phil McNulty credits Laurent Koscielny's intervention with denying Fernando Torres an early goal.
- 2An organized effort by family and friends to persuade someone with an addiction or other serious psychological problem to seek professional treatment.
His colleagues organized an intervention when his drinking began to affect his work.
The intervention was emotional, but it convinced her to enter treatment.
- 3A treatment, procedure, or other action carried out to improve a patient's health or change a clinical outcome.
Clinicians compared the new drug intervention against standard care.
The trial measured how each intervention affected recovery time.
Similartreatment, therapy, procedure
Note
A clinician's umbrella word for anything done deliberately to change a patient's course, from a drug to surgery. In medicine and research it is mostly countable and often plural: doctors personally tailor interventions, and trials weigh one intervention against standard care. Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Psychotherapy (1988) applies it to psychotherapy, asking whether such interventions are medical treatments or spiritual care. Keep it distinct from the confrontation staged by family.
- 4A legal motion by which someone not originally named in a lawsuit asks the court to make them a party to it.
The neighboring landowner sought intervention in the dispute over water rights.
The court granted the union's intervention in the contract case.
Note
Here stepping in is a formal request rather than an act: an outsider to a US lawsuit asks the court to be let in. Under US civil procedure it may be available as of right or only by the court's permission. So one seeks or moves for intervention, and the court grants or denies it. Unlike the everyday sense, nothing happens until a judge agrees.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Middle French "intervention", from Latin "interventiō". It can also be analyzed as "intervene" plus the suffix "-tion".