From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: misc.consumers,misc.consumers.frugal-living,talk.politics.medicine,
	sci.med
Subject: Re: Medicare and Bret's Reality (was: Disappointed and confused--don't
Date: 13 May 1999 07:59:05 GMT

In <7hc2rp$in3$1@nina.pagesz.net> henryj@nina.pagesz.net (George
Conklin) writes:

>   Medical systems are oriented towards control and power,
> with science being used to justify the result.

And in the nex message:

>   Hospitals are run exactly like what you seem to fear,
>i.e. 'gestapo tactaics' of total control.  I somethimes
>think that the fear expressed by MDs here is quite
>justified:  what if the control mechanisms that are used on
>patients are just turned around to the MD herself?  Is that
>the real fear?


COMMENT:

   Nonsense.  Science and law and economics are the ONLY reasons
hospitals are built the way they are, and power for the sake of power
has got absolutely nothing to do with it.  Hospitals are necessarily
tightly controlled environments for a good many very legitimate
logistic, scientific, and legal reasons.  They don't come *close* to
the level of security and general obscessive control you find inside a
miroprocessor fabrication plant or a satellite manufacturing facility,
and these have nothing to do with desire for power (as in power over
people).  In medicine, however, the object under study is necessarily a
person with an illness, not a piece of technology, and this causes some
people to mistake a controlled environment institution for some kind of
jail.

   But why assume that?  Nobody seriously suggests that at Intel or
Motorola, people in white suits are getting some kind of fetishistic
jollies by containing and studying and disecting and generally being
very controlling with some poor naked Comsat or microchip.  Rather, we
understand that if you want to cut the number of variables in a complex
technical or scientific operation, you don't do it by turning down the
lights, opening the windows to the soft breezes of Spring, popping a
brew, putting a steak on the barbicue, and calling the dog.  The
accusation that this doesn't happen in hospitals with patients, only
because of some kind of powertripping derangement on behalf of the
staff, says more about the perverted minds of the accusers than
anything else.  You can talk about your Gesundheit Institute hospital
right after you show me how the Gesundheit NASA cleanrooms and Lunar
mineral curation facilities work.  Meanwhile, it might be best to let
such fantasies stay in the imagination where they live best.