Some readers (like Michael Barone) were skeptical when I wrote about the coming technological revolution in American medicine and hailed it as our one chance for the kind of health care Americans really want (better, cheaper and more abundant than what we now have).
But here’s a story from the New York Times that suggests that the transformation of American medicine is coming even faster than I expected. All over the country, American men are turning to robot-assisted doctors for one of the most personal and sensitive procedures in any man’s life: prostate surgery. Although, as the article reports, there is no clear scientific evidence that robo-docs get a better result than the old-fashioned kind, and although robo-docs cost more, patients would rather pay more to have machine-aided surgery.
I thought that patient resistance to technology would slow down the pace of change. People wouldn’t want to trust irreplaceable body parts to the tender ministrations of a machine. But it looks like I was at least partly wrong. A hands-on, old fashioned urologist in Houston told the New York Times how he was losing patients when he told them that he ‘handled’ his customers the traditional way. As the Times puts it:
But now, patient after patient was walking away. They did not want that kind of surgery. They wanted surgery by a robot, controlled by a physician not necessarily even in the operating room, face buried in a console, working the robot’s arms with remote controls.
“Patients interview you,” said Dr. Cadeddu, a urologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. “They say: ‘Do you use the robot? O.K., well, thank you.’ ” And they leave.
Read the whole thing and see the surgical company’s promotional video below–and remember Mead’s First Law: The future is closer than you think.