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Digital Health, Future Medicine, Physicians, Technology

Medicine’s Race with the Machines

March 16, 2017 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 2 minutes

IMG_5613Like many professionals, I’m trapped in the now. I function with dated workflows and connect with patients like doctors did a hundred years ago. Elements in our world are moving, however, but no one notices. Even those of us with a remote sense of the changes ahead have a hard time understanding what’s happening to us.

According to tech visionary Kevin Kelly we are in the process of becoming. Our technology and consequently our profession and ourselves are changing. While not referencing medicine, Kevin Kelly in The Inevitable could have been:

The problem with constant becoming is that unceasing change can blind us to its incremental changes. In constant motion we no longer notice the motion. Becoming is thus a self-cloaking action often seen only in retrospect. More important, we tend to see new things from the frame of the old. We extend our current perspective to the future, which in fact distorts the new to fit into what we already know. That is why the first movies were filmed like theatrical plays and the first VRs shot like movies.

And when we notice that we are under redefinition we become indignant and push back.

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines.

Here’s the important part of the race: How and if we choose to preserve those things that only we can do is entirely up to us. How we allow ourselves to be defined is something altogether different. Contrary to what every current physician believes, humans have agency.

If you’re a doctor or any other health care stakeholder clinging to a 20th century ideal of how and what a doctor should be, read Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable . If you dare.

Links to The Inevitable are Amazon affiliate links

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Tagged With: Physicians

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Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
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With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
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