Question:
If you had to choose between giving up the past century's technology in the area of telecommunications, or the past century's technology in the area of medicine, which would you give up?
I realize it is an impossible choice. The two technologies evolved together and depend upon each other, but think about the choice and what we would give up.
If we gave up telecommunications, we would have radio, just barely. In 1923, about one percent of U.S. households had radios at home, but there were a few radio stations coming on the air. We had telephones with switchboard operators. Telegraphs were in operation. Motion pictures existed, but they weren't yet "talkies," not until 1927.
People got by. They didn't know they didn't have the internet. However, in the 1940s the Dick Tracy comic strip imagined portable wireless communication on a wrist.
In an era without wireless digital communication, newspapers with comics existed, as did classified ads, and therefore a robust print news culture. This blog would be inconceivable, although maybe some newspaper would have let me have an opinion column, if I didn't offend advertisers too much.
I would keep modern health care.
Without modern health care, life would be far more precarious. People use to die of things that are readily treatable now.
Infectious diseases killed millions of people. Modern plumbing reduced the worst of waterbourne infections, but there was still the MMR suite of diseases (measles, mumps, rubella) plus chicken pox and polio. The Spanish Flu had just killed a surprising group of people: healthy young adults. I remember the ongoing fear my parents projected about polio around swimming pools, for some reason, until the mass polio inoculations when I was in elementary school.
Plus we now have medicines to deal with bacterial and viral infections. Plus cardiovascular interventions. Surgeries of all kinds.
This comes to mind because I was feeling pretty great until a few days ago when I had a cough and fever, and it got worse over two days. I had uncontrollable coughing. I went into urgent care, a physician assistant listened to my lungs, and sent me for an X-ray in the next room. Thanks to modern medical technology they had an instant report. Apparently, I was rapidly moving toward pneumonia. "Pneumonia, the old man's friend," as the old saying went, because people who were otherwise suffering from some painful disease would die quickly from suffocation. They sent a prescription order to my pharmacy, and I was taking six different pills within an hour. Within six hours I was feeling way better. Now, four days later, I feel great again.
President Trump is entering dangerous territory. I am guessing almost everyone has some personal or family story that involves access to the health care world. The U.S. health care payments system is expensive and clunky, but it is lifesaving if you can access it. His attacks on the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), his HHS secretary's muddling the story on vaccinations, and his efforts to reduce access to Medicaid have huge potential to backfire. When you can't breathe you get desperate pretty quickly.
Trump's flagrant authoritarianism worries me deeply, but I stay optimistic that his hubris and overreach, in the area of healthcare and elsewhere, will destroy his popular support.
He is sowing the seeds of his own destruction. The Trump virus in America won't last forever. I can sit here and take a big, deep sigh of relief at that prospect. Whew.
7 comments:
Might have died in early 30 s due to hemmoroids and certainly would have been a cripple at 60 due to needing hip surgery. I would choose health car as I like being alive.
In the question of communications vs. health care, then I'd choose communications. I'm very healthy, and I try to maintain my health. For the most part, I can do without doctors. I can't do without the internet. When I was a kid, we had the "World Book Encyclopedias" or newspapers to research facts. Today we have the internet. I can research anything in the world in about 15 seconds. I believe that knowledge is power, and the internet provides an incredible amount of knowledge. I would be lost without the internet.
I’m with you on healthcare. Without medication I wouldn’t be alive now. My 35 year old daughter who works in Tech asked me what I did at the office before computers and even Fax machines. I recounted a paper-based system that worked surprisingly well. The argument that we are more “productive” may be true, but at what price to our quality of life? Is productivity the only metric that matters? Why? I’m starting to agree with Huxley’s concern that the unlimited ability to publish ideas would eventually trivialize them, and people stop caring.
Saving lives beats enhancing lives, in my view.
Meanwhile, a bad virus can cripple or debilitate even when it doesn’t kill!
Trump won’t be around much longer, but if he’s allowed to dismantle our democratic republic, the damage will last far longer than he does. That’s why he’s the most effective sabotage Putin ever unleashed on the U.S.
There was a time when legislators were referred to as ‘public servants.’ Since they make the laws (or they did before Trump) they have pretty good healthcare coverage. The poorest Americans should have at least as good coverage as their servants, but they don’t. Anyway, I’m very glad you’re better. And you’re right: medical and communication technology developed simultaneously and are interdependent. If I had to choose one or the other, I’d go with the medical, but that’s probably because I was an RN.
I could live without the internet, in fact I have, but without modern medicine most people my age would be dead. On the other hand, that would include trump and also, we wouldn’t be dealing with over 8 billion people on the planet. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Mike- doesn’t it make you wonder if Trump would be where he is if not for modern communication, not just for him but all the 24/7 propaganda machinery that dulls people’s minds?
I think calling Trump's ranting, raving and boldfaced lies 'communication' is using the term too loosely. He and his white-wing whacko noise machine have turned this into the disinformation age, although it started with Gingrich's 'Contract on America.'
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