Medical technology

As per Barnes (1999), patients’ search for “greater technical surety creates a major problem for the maintenance of an expert-lay relation. The more we base this relationship on technical knowledge rather than trust, the more the relationship between the two begins to break down or, more precisely, questions about our status as moral actors are redefined in terms of questions of a purely technical matter. Rather than ‘healers,’ medics are becoming ‘technologists of the body.’ . . . The arrival of the ‘expert patient’ simply gives a further twist to the technical ratchet . . . the ways in which these technologies are defined, given meaning, and challenged by lay actors is opening the medical ‘black bag’ and loosening rather than strengthening the control the doctor has over items found within it” (451, 452),