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Food for thought…Artificial-Limb Envy?
About Idea of the Day
“Idea of the Day” is a blog by Tom Kuntz and other editors of the Week in Review highlighting the most interesting writing we’ve come across lately on the Web. We’re generalists, so consider this a thinking person’s grazing buffet.Today’s idea: Technology and the marketplace have transformed the artificial limb from emblem of hurt and loss into paradigm of the “sleek, modern and powerful,” an article says. Prosthetics now provoke envy, and a desire for further tissue removal for self-enhancement.
Oscar Pistorius. Unfair advantage?
Medicine | Traumatic physical loss aside, there are many advantages to having your leg amputated, Paul Hochman writes in Fast Company. Ask Hugh Herr, double amputee and director of a “biomechatronics” group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says he feels sorry for the able-bodied: “It’s actually unfair. As tech advancements in prosthetics come along, amputees can exploit those improvements. They can get upgrades. A person with a natural body can’t.”
That prompts envious exclamations from non-amputees, the article reports, like: “Hey! I want a robot hand.” Amputees, meanwhile, regularly pay out-of-pocket to remove healthy tissue to make room for more powerful technology (and, in the case of double leg amputees, maybe gain a few inches of height in the bargain). “People will get a second amputation — move their amputation up their leg — to get the prosthetic equivalent of a hotter car,” says a prosthetic company representative.
The new prosthetics are expensive, with sales set to boom from a rise in diabetes-related amputations. (Despite the media attention they get, injured war veterans are a tiny segment of the market.) And though the article doesn’t get into it, the cost raises anew the question of the have-nots of technological advance — the amputee victims of the Haitian earthquake, for example.
