Strange Combinations

We are having a group dinner consisting of pot luck appetizers this evening because of lots of complicated schedules. I took this picture while I was waiting to check out in Oliver's, our favorite grocery store. Remember when the shelves next to the check out counter were filled with Snickers bars, and women's and celebrity magazines? A coconut ash and banana chocolate bar might be healthier but it doesn't even sound good. Guajillo and chipotle are peppers, better in a salsa than a chocolate bar....

Our A/I and ethics class today had a twist which I feared would backfire. The Dr Sulliman is in Berlin at a conference, and gave his talk on robots and health care remotely from there. The gold standard for robotic surgery is a truly frightening looking machine called da Vinci. Here is an interesting article about the development of da Vinci if you are interested, and here's  a picture of what greets you when you are rolled into the operating room for robotic surgery.

Robots that can perform operations remotely were initially developed by the Department of Defense as a way for doctors to patch up soldiers who are blown up in battle from behind enemy lines. That didn't work out so well, and neither did all of the technology for our lecture today...actually a rather low tech assemblage of laptops, a too-small, too low screen, an inability to darken the room and a sound system which failed to transmit the sound both ways across two continents and an ocean.

This didn't exactly inspire confidence in the robot to perform surgery remotely. Dr. Sulliman,  himself had part of a kidney removed last year via robotic surgery. He studied the pros and cons intensively beforehand. His wry joke was that when he was wheeled into the operating room he was confronted by the daunting da Vinci looming over the operating table, and finally found his surgeon staring at a computer screen in a corner of the room. She was not amused when he asked whether she was studying the instructions for his surgery.

'Surgeons don't have much sense of humor', he commented.

He said he would take some questions before we adjourned. A woman asked if he had it to do over again, would he make the same choice? He said, 'I'll bet that was a great question. I wish I could have heard it'.

Our neighbor, a retired orthopedic surgeon, is due shortly for dinner. IT might just be an interesting conversation....