The next AAAS-CHF history seminar will take place Wednesday, October 7, 4:30-6:00 p.m. Dr. Stanley Joel Reiser, Clinical Professor of Health Care Sciences and of Health Policy, The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, will speak on the timely topic of "The Rise of Technological Medicine: Consequences for Patients, Doctors and Health Care Reform."
Dr. Reiser's research and teaching have contributed to the development of four areas of study: medical ethics training, the application of technology assessment to health care, analyses of the role of values that guide policies and decision-making in health care organizations, and coordination of leaders in medicine and public health to improve national health care policy. He is the author of over 120 books and essays and his most recent publication is Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients (Cambridge University Press, September 2009; see https://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521835695&ss=fro).
Dr. Reiser received his medical degree from the State University of New York-Downstate Medical Center and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University.
The seminar is part of a series co-hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science Archives and the Chemical Heritage Foundation's Center for Contemporary History and Policy that explores social, institutional, and intellectual histories of contemporary policy problems that are interwoven with developments in science and technology. For summaries of past seminars, please see http://archives.aaas.org/seminar/.
To RSVP, contact Amy Crumpton [acrumpto@aaas.org or 202-326-6791]. All seminars will be held in the Revelle Conference Room, 2nd floor, AAAS Headquarters, 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20005. Light refreshments will be served.
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Reiser, of course, is the author of the seminal 1978 monograph on the rise of technological medicine, which has not only held up well, but has actually increased in significance in the intervening years. For all the talk about the significance of innovation to health -- the extent of which is, IMO, typically assumed rather than argued -- the well-documented evidence that technical innovation drives as much as 40% of increasing health care expenditures in any given year should give us sharp pause to consider the social and cultural roots of the love of technology. Reiser's work is critical in this regard. Moreover, Reiser's analysis is particularly relevant to one of my areas of focus, the history of medical imaging, which plays a critical role in not only hyperinflationary health care costs, but also in our (vain, based on recent evidence) insistence on imaging chronic pain sufferers.
(h/t H-SCI-MED-TECH)
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