Saturday, April 28, 2012
The Human Body: Modern or Moronic
Atul Gawande's "The Checklist" portrays a very frustrating push- pull relationship about the lengths and limits of human beings. On the one hand, you have doctors who have the luxury of saying survival in hospitals is a commonplace thanks to the technical achievements made by human intelligence and creativity. On the other hand, it sounds like these technical achievements are making survival too robotic. The first example in the article describes the surreal incident of doctors being able to go to extraordinary lengths in order to save a girl's life who ordinarily would have been pronounced dead upon arrival to the hospital. The chance of her being able to not only survive, but regain the quality of her life was turned around 180 degrees in a matter of two weeks thanks to both modern machinery and the doctors' knowledge about it. This story spoke highly of doctors acting as real life superheroes, but they were only allowed to have such a success story because of the machinery available throughout the hospital. In fact, when the girl's story of recovery was being shared, it sounded more like someone was building a Frankenstein robot rather than saving a human's life. In one way it sounds like less of a triumph because the doctors forced recovery upon a body which could not heal, with the help of doctors, on its own. In another way it says that people should be proud that technology allows doctors and patients to have more control over the safety and progress of their recovery because patients deserve to live as long as they can. In no way do I think that a person's life should be cut short when there are so many modern options that could go so far as bring someone back from practically the dead, but I question if people want to prevent death and disease so much, they will recreate their bodies with pumps and tubes and metal in order to add years on. Why not take advantage of all the medical choices we have waiting to help us; I just question the quality of a person's life being improved when part of them was built in a laboratory.
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The topic of the association between machinery and the prolonging and improvement in the quality of human life reminds me of the MRI, mammogram and X-Ray machines discussed at length in "How Doctors Think". The author described the benefits and risks of the advancement in medical technology. The radiologists and specialists began to miss things because they were intimidated by the technology and many of them second guessed prognosis's which were correct because the FDA approved machinery indicated there could be a problem.
ReplyDeleteI am fond of the idea of technology being used to advance human life. Prostetic legs were once seen as abnormal and scary, but we know they are beneficial to those who no longer have limbs. If the technology used is approved of by check points such as the FDA and doctors can learn to implement them properly, I see no problem with people having artifical legs, lungs, hearts or having scans used to detect lungs rather than a doctors hands, which are only human.