Technological Medicine. the Changing World of Doctors and Patients

Description

Advances in medicine have brought us the stethoscope, artificial kidneys, and computerized health records. They have also changed the doctor-patient relationship. This book explores how the technologies of medicine are created and how we respond to the problems and successes of their use. Stanley Joel Reiser, MD, walks us through the ways medical innovations exert their influence by discussing a number of selected technologies, including the X-ray, ultrasound, and respirator. Reiser creates a new understanding of thinking about how health care is practiced in the United States and thereby suggests new methods to effectively meet the challenges of living with technological medicine. As healthcare reform continues to be an intensely debated topic in America, Technological Medicine shows us the pros and cons of applying technological solutions health and illness.

• Demonstrates key historical factors spurring the invention and use of technologies in medicine, creates a deep understanding of their benefits and problems for contemporary society and medicine • Focuses on the joint role of consumers/patients and physicians in meeting the challenges of technological health care • Provides insight into how physicians think about what illness and health are, and proposes an alternative way to analyze them as key to improving medical care

Contents

1. Revealing the body's whispers: how the stethoscope transformed medicine; 2. Enigmatic pictures: how patients and doctors encountered the X-ray; 3. Life-saving but unaffordable: the improbable journey of the artificial kidney; 4. Promising rescue, preventing release: the double edge of the artificial respirator; 5. The quest to unify health care through the patient record; 6. Putting technologies on trial: from bloodletting to antibiotics to the Oregon initiative; 7. Amid the technological triumphs of disease prevention - where is health?; 8. The technological transformation of birth; 9. Governing the empire of machines.