Late last year and early this, I went through a long, painful, debilitating illness. I'm OK now, but if the original diagnosis had turned out to be correct (they thought at first that it was pancreatic cancer), I would by now either be hanging on in a hospice or permanently resident in the marble orchard. The fact that I'm back in the saddle again is almost entirely owing to science and technology. It was a complicated problem to diagnose, and they never would have done it without CAT scans (that's COMPUTER Aided Tomography) and ultrasound. Throughout the course of this thing, I had about a dozen blood draws, each one processed and analyzed with the aid of sophisticated laboratory technology. Once they figured out what was wrong, I underwent a couple of surgical procedures to fix it. My dad, who is a retired physician, told me that someone with my condition thirty years ago would have undergone major surgery and spent ten days to two weeks in the hospital. Thanks to modern surgical techniques made possible by miniaturization and imaging technology (all computer-aided), I never had to spend a single night in the hospital. Thanks to modern anesthesia, the surgery was pretty much pain-free. I know something about the history of medicine, and it's absolutely certain that a hundred years ago, this would have killed me, and there wouldn't have been a damn thing anyone could have done about it.
This experience was instructive in a number of ways. At the time, I was in no physical or emotional state to be reflective about it, but looking back I can see my physician applying scientific method, formulating and testing hypotheses, accepting, discarding, or modifying them, a process that was critically dependent on technology every step of the way. It's also obvious that the existence of technologies like CAT scanning, and their widespread availability, depends not just on native human ingenuity, but on the elaborate social structures that produce them.
I am a genteel, "middle-class," middle-aged, native-born white American with health insurance, who wasn't suffering from a stigmatized disease or condition, so the system treated me pretty well, both in solving the medical problem and in the degree of solicitude I received from those I encountered while making my way through it. Had I entered the system with a different set of personal attributes, it's a safe bet that my experience would have been quite different. Even so, once it came time to settle up the bills things got rather snarly for a while. My HMO tried to weasel out of paying for some of the lab work and stick the lab with the costs, which in turn tried to stick them to me. (The thought of having to pay those bills was as scary as the illness itself--I jest, of course). I know how to negotiate bureaucracies--hell, I work in one--and some lawyer friends fed me some scary-sounding words and phrases to use when I talked to these people on the phone, so I was ultimately able to get them to back down and pay up. So there's class privilege at work. The health care system in the US is clearly fraught with injustice from top to bottom. Reflecting on my experience, both what I experienced directly and what I observed, one might say that the science/medicine/technology side of it worked wonderfully well, the social/economic/political side of it less so. Seems to me that it's the latter that mostly needs fixing, not the former.
I have never had much sympathy for wooly technophobic anarcho-greenery, and it's now no longer a theoretical question for me. It's all very well to say that one ought to reflect on the role that technology plays in our lives, but don't we already do that all the time? Look in the Science section of the NYT, and you'll see plenty of well-informed reflection on the social and ethical aspects of technology. Anyone who wants to do without modern technology is free to do so--or, you can always pick and choose. I, for instance, do not own a "BlackBerry" and do not intend to get one. Anyway, next time you get sick, try the laying on of hands or channeling your chi or dosing yourself with herbal remedies, if that's your pleasure. Good luck.
Jacob Conrad