On October 14, I’ll be doing a keynote address at The Patient and The Practitioner in the Age of Technology: Promoting Healing Relationships, a medical conference at Brown University in Providence, RI. The title of my talk is "Story and Data: Embracing the Past and Creating the Future.”
Please read this blog version instead of my original piece about monkeypox, published in the summer issue of Chicago Life Magazine. Things are changing very fast in this field. A significant share of the information cited in the first rendition has changed in the two months that have passed since I submitted it in June. This pace of change will no doubt continue for a while. So consider what you read below to be as up-to-date as was possible on August 20, 2022. You can expect that numbers will grow and treatments will evolve. But the underlying principles of the biology and epidemiology of infectious disease should hold up just fine.
As you know, for many publications there is often a significant lead time between submission and publication of a print article. (No delay between writing and posting is one of the huge advantages of publishing a blog.) Because monkeypox had just appeared over the horizon in America, during the interval between when I wrote the piece and when the public received information about the disease was changing ultrafast. I called the publisher to make some serious edits a couple of weeks after I’d submitted my article in early July. It was too late. The edition was already at the printer.
I recently encountered an incontrovertible and mind blowing fact. 1970 is equidistant from 1918 and 2022. In 1970, when I was 22 years old, 1918 seemed impossibly long ago. My grandfather was 20 years old in 1918. Compared to my current perspective as a retired family doctor, 1970 doesn’t feel to me nearly so far from today as 1918 did in 1970 when I was a first year medical student.
If I were asked where to locate the essence of physical identity, I would answer without hesitation, “in the immune system,” the part of our physiology tasked with distinguishing each of us from everybody and everything else in the world. The face comes in second. By messing with images of our face, technology messes with who we are. My message here is consistent with my overall view of technology. We need to be deliberate and careful in how we use it, especially when we capture, process, analyze and present images of ourselves.
These days it’s healthcare administrators, much more than doctors, who decide what is to be done in healthcare.
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