Archive for February, 2009
Lance's Machine is Only as Good as It's Rider (2009 Tour of California)
A sketch from the 1983 Monty Python Movie “The Meaning of Life” entitled “The Miracle of Birth” plays on the irony of how an over-emphasis on technology interferes with the delivery of health care. “The Machine that goes ‘Ping’” is a central metaphor in this classic skit in that the Machine is so central to impressing the hospital administrator and occupying the attention of the medical staff that the care of the patient becomes a secondary concern to the doctors:
“There seems to be something missing though… hmmm…”
“Patient, yes. Where is the patient?”
“The Machine That Goes ‘Ping’” is a central metaphor for what I see increasingly in plastic surgery as more of a marketing technique than true advances in the field. It is always the next great-thing that is being promoted by the medical device manufacturers. It is the “New” procedure and the “Latest-Greatest” technology that the PR firms are helping doctors and device manufacturers pitch to the media.
Appropriately, leaders in our American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery have sounded significant concerns about the role of both physicians and corporations in promoting new technologies in plastic surgery.
As a Plastic Surgeon, I stand on the shoulders of Plastic Surgeons that have come before me and on our specialty’s foundations in reconstructive surgery. Plastic Surgery is at it’s core a problem-solving specialty. Principles and tools, together with years of training, experience and judgement, enable the “thinking” plastic surgeon to advance our craft. There is no cook book technique, no weekend course, no “board of cosmetic surgery” meeting, and certainly no magical machine or technology that replaces this.
For every true advance in our field, there are several now-discarded “new” technologies and ideas that were either dangerous, ineffective or unneeded. A principles-based approach to evaluating the new stuff allows me to assess how the “new” stuff may or may not be new, and may or may not be effective and safe.
