Cooking Slowly – A Tale of Ever-Changing Times

NOTE:  If you find this interesting, click on the link at the end to find an expanded version for which you may be able to obtain Continuing Education credit. There is an old adage that if you put a live frog in a pot of water and heated it gradually, that frog would just sit in the water and not jump away (even though it could) until the water boils and it is thoroughly cooked.  It may or may not be true (no one has really tried it since the late 1880s), but either way it is an excellent metaphor for certain things. Some authors have been concerned about the replacement of people with robots, automatic tellers, and other types of automation in the workplace because of the associated loss of jobs (1).  This is one concern, but I want to focus on another.  It is about humanity and interpersonal…

Continue reading

Your New Robotic Doc

This holiday weekend I took some time to catch up on my reading and ended up in a place I often end up in.  That is the question of how to best configure and offer health care, including care in the area currently termed “mental health.”  I put it that way because, as a proponent of integrating mind and body and healing the centuries old Western split between mind and body, I think there really should be no distinction between mental and physical health.  Perhaps that is the first point to be made. One short article from the Atlantic Monthly entitled The Robot Will See You Now by Jonathan Cohn generated pages of notes.  This article focuses on IBMs Watson, best known for its success on the TV quiz program “Jeopardy,” which apparently is now focused on the medical information available at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. …

Continue reading