The medical device industry, which is both more powerful and far less regulated than its pharmaceutical companion, is also perhaps more deeply cannibalistic, turning patients into expendable consumers without any incentive or regulatory burden to account for its costs. The Bleeding Edge, by veteran filmmaking team Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, shows the violent side of this industrial Wild West, one that has wrought tremendous suffering for those whose bodies have become crucibles of innovation. ![]() A reporter covering the medical industry goes so far as to suggest that the production and use of medical devices are not only “a way of life for post-industrial society - they are a reason for the existence of post-industrial society.” It’s a futurist fantasy that’s at least a century old but has yet to become obsolete. Are such medical devices a “means to an end of unleashing innovation to improve and save lives,” as one industry lobbyist featured in the film insists to a room full of business people and politicians? Or are they the latest instruments of the iatrogenic culture of medicine? By 2050, the techno-optimists of this room are told, their organs will be custom-regenerated and their doctors will be computers. It is this last category, devices that become an enduring part of the patients in whom they are implanted, that claim the spotlight in The Bleeding Edge. Under the regulatory apparatus of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the category of medical device includes everything from tongue depressors and heating pads to imaging technologies and implantable technologies ranging from stents to pacemakers. And like Westworld, The Bleeding Edge is a contemporary portrait of how a misguided quest for innovation is eroding the forms of connection that make us human. While medical devices are less sexy than scantily clad androids, they both become possible in a world where innovation is its own justification and regulation more often protects those who make technology than those whose bodies it alters. The film’s aesthetic self-consciously echoes Westworld’s intro, featuring seductive imagery of medical technology against a spooky soundtrack. The Bleeding Edge is a timely and harrowing new documentary for Netflix that exposes, much like a Crichton tale, medical innovation gone out of control. This has also been the year when Silicon Valley’s heroic self-narrative began to crumble under the weighty evidence of its dystopic potential, allowing Westworld to emerge as shorthand for anxieties about human’s relationships to their machines. One of the most talked about shows of this year has been HBO’s Westworld, a reboot of Crichton’s 1973 film. In 2018, the priest and the pulp fiction writer both seem like prophets. In an interview in Playboy, Crichton explained that medicine’s obsession with the scientific cutting edge had cast the “the physician as technician and the patient as a biological machine that was broken.” Crichton had already achieved commercial success with the novel The Andromeda Strain (made into a film by Robert Wise), and, in 1973, he wrote and directed a movie that used his insider knowledge of the medical present to project a dire posthuman future. Illich had an unlikely ally in Hollywood, where a young, Harvard-trained MD named Michael Crichton was broadcasting calls for medical reform through fiction. ![]() In 1975, Illich’s takedown of the profession, Medical Nemesis, became a nonfiction best seller. As a spiritual thinker, Illich held a deeper concern that doctors had become cogs in an institutional machine that robbed them of the ability to adequately address human suffering. Rather, he blamed the system in which they practiced, one that was oriented toward a dispassionate embrace of science at the expense of humility and humanity. Illich did not believe physicians were intentionally trying to hurt their patients. ![]() Indeed, that was what Ivan Illich, a Catholic priest and philosopher, charged in a damning, if arcane, attack on what he called the “iatrogenic” culture of medicine: its healers’ tendency to bring forth harm. The pharmaceutical industry was booming, a sure sign to some that the medical profession had sold its soul - if it ever had one to begin with - to big business. IT WAS THE mid-1970s, and medicine’s so-called golden age was beginning to lose its luster.
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