Medical technology

By pushing back the boundaries of abnormality to find disease at earlier and earlier stages, “medical technology has created patients without symptoms, the ‘worried well,’ who occupy what we might call a therapeutic limbo, adding new forms of ambiguity and risk for both physicians and those subject to their gaze. Consequently, these new forms of screening and classification that are to be found throughout most advanced health systems create a situation where the control they engender may well be much less than some of the theoretical models of surveillance culture might suggest” (Webster, 445). . . . STS shows that the ‘technical’ is always socially shaped, and that together socio-technologies can be re-invented, reconfigured in different contexts and take on more or less degrees of ‘mutability’ and ‘mobility (Mol and Law, 1994; Latour, 2000). . . . in regard to the meaning of ‘illness’ or disease, or indeed ‘health,’ contemporary technoscience . . . is by virtue of this very complexity unlikely to be able to offer medical diagnoses that derive from pathological cause to symptomatic effect. Instead, high-tech medicine generates forms of diagnosis that are more likely to depend on the language of risk and probabilities than the language of causality. . . . In the context of informatics, the arrival of a multiplicity of virtual (Internet-based) information sources through which people (whether patients or not) can obtain publicly available as well as commercial advice has also created further opportunity for uncertainty and risk. These developments in both genetic and informatics, dependent as they are on ever-sophisticated socio-technologies, weaken the epistemological and professional authority of medical science and practice (447-48). . . . The third sense in which we can say that contemporary health technologies are qualitatively distinct from the past is that they deconstruct the physical body as the locus for health and illness. . . . Developments in genetic and informatics can be seen to redefine the boundaries of the body while working to dematerialize the body – not only for lay people but physicians too. The physical sense we have of the link between person, body and health may well be disrupted by the advent of cybernetic medicine with supercomputers being used to produce models of in silico organs, organ systems and eventually the ‘Virtual Human’” (449).