Technicization of surgery, a real danger

Abstract

Technicized medicine foreshadows a dehumanisation of care : patients are seen as tools for progress, and doctors are focused on the therapeutical means to be developed. Therefore, surgeons are torn between their desires, as technicians, to improve their tech-nical skills, and their duty, as doctors, to look after each patient who needs care. The advent of laparaoscopy has changed the way doctors consider their patients' bodies. The current state of surgery is in crisis insofar as humanist surgery can no longer meet the aspirations of modern surgery. This inadequacy puts surgeons in a difficult position, especially those who fear that their jobs will turn them into pure technicians. The ethical and esthetic dimensions of surgery are changing, and that's why we need a new approach to the profession. The new ethical dimension must result in a new intellectual attitude that accepts the ambiguity of modern technology, a source of both progress and peril. Surgeons must constantly adopt a critical stance in the analysis of their decisions, in order to treat patients instead of considering them as mere tools used for medical progress. The new esthetic dimension must comprehend and define a new surgical scenery. Surgery is changing. Surgeons must evolve with their times and means, and keep their fundamental legacy in mind, that which places patients at the center of their intentions.