That said, not all new technologies work as they should and there should be constant testing of new treatments to test their safety and effectiveness.
(sorry I posted so late.. completely forgot about the blog this week.. will do better next time)
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Irrational fears, availability heuristic --> cognitive bias
It really seems like a lot of people are scared of certain technological advances because they simply don't understand them. The fact is that most new technologies are superbly complex and to understand how they work would require a lot of (mostly esoteric) knowledge. Thus, since people don't really know how things work, they rely on: 1. what "experts" (on their favorite biased news network) say, 2. what the results of these new technologies are. So whenever a technology comes along and produces positive results, people are happy about it and like the new technology. However, when something goes wrong and one person exposed to the new technology suffers some crazy adverse reaction, public sentiment shifts to fear. Of course I'm generalizing, but this is how I see things a lot of times. Everything in health care should be considered in terms of a cost-to-benefit ratio. Costs include both financial costs and health risks involved. People tacitly accept the cost and risk of getting in their car and driving because they see the convenience of driving places as a big enough benefit to outweigh the costs (both actual and potential). It is very helpful that people are very familiar with driving and do it all the time, so they have a good understanding of the risks involved. If they hear of a horrible car accident, it doesn't bother them that much because they can remember driving every day for the past year without any incident. However, if they hear of a mishap in some new screening technology they have no familiarity with, they will automatically think of that mishap if they ever have to go to get the screening. People are bad at estimating the frequency of certain events partly because they rely on what they can easily bring to mind. This isn't always a bad thing because it lets people rely on their own experiences to affect their future behaviors, but since people get a lot of their information from the media, their perception of reality can be skewed.
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I agree w/ what filip is saying. There are always risks associated with all new technologies as there are risks with all of the actions we take in life. Whenever we walk into certain buildings we see signs stating that we may be exposed to possible carcinogens. In fact almost everything now is a carcinogen. So it truly depends on whether people can be objective enough to realize that the benefits of advanced technology (well in my opinion at least) outweigh the costs and risks of it. The media unfortunately has to report those instances where it does not work in order to create a story and that doesn't look like its going to change anytime soon.
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