Tech and health care
A weekly nugget or two of pain science news and ideas for patients and pros, usually 400–1000 words. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
What could possibly go wrong? Every time your computer glitches or your smart phone acts stupid — “Hey, Siri, can you do anything right?” — remember that software also controls medical systems. You’ll have a hard time forgetting it after reading this: “The Overdose: How Medical Tech Gave a Patient a Massive Overdose.”
This story is a chilling example of the biggest problem with modern medicine: the kafka-esque institutionalization of healthcare, and our fumbling early attempts to computerize and automate tasks that were all once done exclusively by people. The hospitals of the Twenty-Second Century are probably going to work better. Maybe.