[med/anthro] Re Surgeons, 2

[siderea]

I'm not planning on critiquing or criticising surgery at all; I'm ultimately going somewhere completely else with this.

But as a side note, while I was writing, Would you consider that a fault with surgery as a medical practice, that needs to be remedied through better standarization and training?
I suddenly remembered something, from the

Comments

[gipsieee]

Hmmmm..... yeah.. fascinating.
Especially as I try to balance natural birth leanings with evidence-based practice recommendations with what seems to actually be happening in modern obstetrics.
It's maddening.

[siderea]

If you haven't read the whole thing, I highly recommend it.

One of his points is pretty basic, but not obvious to outsiders: since one gets what one measures, and obstetricians have a measure for the outcome of the newborn, but not for the outcome of the laboring mother, obstetrics has a huge bias towards interventions that help newborns without any consideration of the extent to which they may be detrimental to the mothers. Maybe we need an Apgar for post partem moms, too.

[squirrelitude]

That's an excellent point.

[alexx_kay]

"You do research to find new techniques. You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands."

What I was saying, in my comment on the previous post, about being leery of standardization -- THIS is the sort of idea that I very much prefer.

[nuclearpolymer]

I think a technique which can go well or go badly due to skill, art, or judgement on the part of the practitioner is particularly susceptible to being replaced, because it makes it really easy to go after the practitioner when things go badly. And, if failure is hard to predict even for skilled practitioners, they're not going to want to take the risk either - even if they don't get blamed by the patient/client, they will likely blame themselves. Techniques where results are more predictable, or where the unpredictability is harder to blame on the practitioner, are more likely to become widely adopted in an industry

Complex fields without clear quality measurement systems...

[pamelina]

Huh. Reminds me of painters throughout history. Before the 19th century ability to paint realistic depictions of nature was of primary importance to a painter

Re: Complex fields without clear quality measurement systems...

[siderea]

That's no longer true, and it seems to me that (flat) art tended to get abstract around the time photography got invented.

This is true, but - I could be wrong here - my hazy impression is that abstraction in art ran way ahead of exposure to actual photographs.

Could that mean that the craft--draftsmanship technique, composition skill, became less important to success (with the development of the ultimate realism, photography,) just as forceps use became less important to obstetrics (with the ultimate ease of surgical baby removal)? Photography is to painterly realistic art as cesareans are to forceps deliveries?I don't know for abstract art, how techniquey it is. Honestly, when I look at a lot of modern art - especially modern sculpture, which may not pertain to your example - I'm struck at how incredibly techniquey it is, and often techniquey in some weird unconventional way. Like the guy who became a master of Bernoulli effects of hair driers on balloons. So I have no idea how techniquey abstract modernism is. For all I know