Discuss the relationship between medical technology and culture.

The growth of medical technology threatens the cultural contribution of medicine

by claiming an ever larger slice of medical training time. The technologist is a new

cultural type, portentous product of our lay culture, focus both of its admiration

and of its dread. Medicine is not the only profession which is threatened by

assimilation to the role of the technologist and, thus, to a role which is expected to

solve problems, not to pose them. Doctors respond with inventions which impress

a technologically minded lay culture, win larger appropriations of funds, attract

higher concentrations of brains and produce even more improbable inventions,

thus completing the self -exciting spiral which typifies one relation between the

professional and the lay culture. But our culture also fears technology and all the

problems of size and depersonalization which technology involves. It is distressing

that in our hospitals, though the technological resources for processing cases grow

constantly in refinement and cost per bed, the human resources for caring for sick

persons steadily decline. It is more distressing because we know well that their

decline would be even more striking if it were not masked by the massive

technological aid which the over -developed countries win from the under-

developed ones by attracting their potential doctors and nurses and keeping them

after training in numbers so much larger than the more publicized trickle which

flows the other way. Consequently the lay culture is deeply concerned with

humanizing its mass organization and for this to preserve and extend the function

of personal counselling. PAGE NO 46  http://folk.uio.no/regie/litteratur/Artikler/technology.htm