Most of us will go into the hospital at some point. When we do, we might be subject to anesthesia, even for a minor procedures. What goes on while we're asleep is, at least to the patient, a complete mystery. At the same time, we look to the technology of medicine as the panacea to solve so many of our health problems. Yet when it goes wrong we get angry. Clearly, our emotional nexus with technology is out of balance with our intellectual understanding of it. In medicine, the price we pay, often with the simplest of procedures, is fear, alienation, confusion and a degree of appropriate paranoia.
Few understand this better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook. He has used this imbalance to scare the bejesus out of us in his book like Cell, Nano, Coma, Cure, and Fever. Now in his latest work, Host
, he once again walks us through the cost benefit analysis of medical technology falling into the wrong hands.My conversation with Robin Cook:
