Hospitals: A Place for Saving lives Or Waiting place?

Reaction on Philosophy of Man and Technology by Paul Verbeek

In today’s century, we are able to see the unforeseeable things from the past. Like how we can see the inside of our body without spilling blood on the floor. We are able to detect if the brain is still functioning, we are able to track down our health condition by just a click away using a state-of-the-art instrumentation.

Let me cite a situation that I have been thinking through my mind during reading “Philosophy of Man and Technology by Paul Verbeek”. It is my real life situation that just happened last last week. In our tear-drop island in Siargao, my mother was rushed to the hospital because of severe diarrhea and abdominal pain. She was confined there for three days, because of the lack of medical technology they weren’t able to scan what was happening inside her body. The only thing they did was to run a couple of laboratory testing using stool, urine and blood. During the 3^rd day, her health conditions worsen, so she was transferred to a more advance hospital in Surigao City.

My mother was diagnosed with a ruptured appendicitis. See, if our island’s hospital was more advanced they would have known how severe the infection inside her body was. In the operating room, she suffered from cardiac arrest and without these medical technologies I don’t know what would happen. She was revived after an hour and was diagnosed with sepsis secondary to an acute abdomen, ruptured appendicitis with hypoxic encephalopathy. Using a ventilator machine, she was able to breathe. She won’t be able to eat, so the surgeon put on the NGT. She won’t be able to move nor walk nor open her eyes nor even speak. In short, she was in a comatose state.

I was amazed of how these technologies lengthen the life of my mother. The doctor even gave us a 1% chance of her recovery. He even said in my face, “Without the help of the ventilator machine, she wouldn’t last a minute”. How heart-breaking.

But NO! With the help of these technological medical advancements my mother continues to live. Once the vital signs were stable and she can tolerate breathing on her own with an oxygen tank without the machine, we were able to transfer her to a much more advance and complete medical technologies in Perpetual Succour, Cebu City, during the Sinulog, after a week of hopelessly waiting and observing my mother to come back.  In Perpetual Succour, using CT scan, ultrasound and 2Deco we were really able to see her brain activity, abdomen and heart condition, respectively. And we later found out that the cause of her abdominal pain was not ruptured appendicitis. The doctor said, the cardiac arrest was due to low of potassium but we still don’t know what the primary cause of all of this complication is.

Think about this, if there were only CT scan, ultrasound, 2Deco and the likes in our island, we wouldn’t have to go this far. For using these technologies, the doctors were able to diagnose fast accurately and take immediate actions.

Even though, as what I read in “pdf” that using these medical technology, we are fighting against the law of nature, I was really thankful that my mother, with the help of technologies, she continue to live. I do not know if the 2^nd life of my mother was against the nature or the will of God.

The biggest discovery of man that contributed to the world is the technology that help lengthens life. Although, there were some who abuse these technologies, many are developing it for the benefits of mankind. That helps dead brain nerves functions again by connecting specially designed brain nerves. How the latter was against the nature and many more interventions of technology in man, only God knows.

Paul Verbeek, also discusses about the limitation of technology in a way that some people continue to develop not only medical technologies but also a ‘cyborg’ or a robot. Intervening almost every man’s activity from life (things like using ultrasound to know if the baby is healthy and if not, will it be aborted?), in between (like placing brain nerves-like to stimulate the brain but leaves an effect which alters the attitude of a person or how a person usually did things) and death (How we could intervene the supposed to be death of a person by using medical technologies and lengthen person’s life). This raises ethical issues blurring the borderline between ‘technology’ and ‘human’ and their interrelatedness.