How We React To New Medical Technology

Published on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 15:46

	By Dan Swinhoe Follow @DanSwinhoe

Goldsmiths University is conducting pioneering research into how we construct views on advances in medical technology.

The report, HeathGovMatters is a project that looks to interview people involved with every aspect of healthcare, from the patients to the doctors that treat them and the researchers who create the machines that care for them. With more advanced treatments being developed all the time, this study hopes to look at the impact that these new technologies are having on the public and the people that use them, with the focus on predictive and diagnostic imaging, computer implants and developments in genetics and neurology.

"There's lots of talk of potential of technology, but not a lot of research about how people, patient organisations and doctors get involved in them and what their role if any in decisions on new technology," says Julie Hartley, Post-Doctoral Researcher at Goldsmiths' department of Anthropology.

The research, which focuses on neurological conditions, is being conducted over three years and is the first of its kind. It should be completed by May next year and published shortly after. Julie explains the main goal of the study is to raise public awareness of the conditions and technologies that are available.

"I think the main public impact would be to get people thinking critically about the role of technology in health care and in our lives more generally. There's a lot about technology that is taken for granted in our lives, so to take away some of that and put it back in their faces and say, don't you see that technology determined an awful lot of what happens in a doctor's office?"

Once the study is complete there will be a final dissemination seminar in Brussels, where the results will be presented to the European Commission.

“Right now we're writing for an academic audience, but that's where there'll be policy makers, and people who'll be listening to our findings with a less academic ear and a more policy-orientated ear, and there's potential for things to translate to public policy."

Julie says they are not out to prove any hypothesis. "It's a matter of being in the field and having a certain awareness of what you're looking for and letting things happen and following things as they arise. The surprises are more what we didn't find rather than what we did."

"For autism and migraines, the treatments for the conditions are still very much on the fringes so they're seen as experimental and not mainstream.  But for epilepsy everyone knows everything, the treatments are not contentious and everyone works together in a unified group.  I thought that was surprising that you can find two groups that are chaotic in terms in treatment and understanding, then you find one condition that so neat and doctors have complete control over it.  And I think that comes down to the role technology and diagnosis. There's a link between technology and diagnosis, and technology and treatment. If you don't have the technology to diagnose than you can't develop treatment, they go hand in hand."

There are other aspects to the study, which aim to investigate gender and generation and how things are being presented in the media. "Mostly women get migraines and mostly men get autism, but because there's so little known about Migraines, some of the women felt like they weren't being taken seriously by the doctor, because the doctor just saw them as being a whiney woman," Julie says.

The report was done in stages, each focusing on a different group and has involved around 70 people. As well as patients and patient organisations, the study interviewed Neurologists, GPs, and researchers working on the technologies in the area of study. The study used a combination of questionnaires, observation and interviews.

Julie says that for the first part of the study, which looked at patient organisations, they would ask about newsletters and their coverage of new technologies, for example asking about how they cover these new ideas, who decides the content and reactions from readers.

The second section of the project was looking at patients and professionals. The study asked about how they become diagnosed, their reaction to the news, and whether or not after a time they felt more knowledgable about their condition than their doctor did.

"For the GPs, we asked do they diagnose Epilepsy? No, why? Because of the technology. So we go to the people that make the technology. Are there any problems' Yes, there are lots of problems with the technology, but they still get used," She says. "Then we got to the neurologists who use them in the clinical studies and find out more about what they use them for, if there are more technologies coming out how did that come about and what's that translation process the lab and a patient, there has to be that link between them."

The report, funded by the European Commission, is part of the 7th Framework Programme and part of a collaborative project between Goldsmiths in the UK, ICCR in Austria and Zeppelin University, Germany. "One of the two of leads of the project, Jacqueline Luce, had a done FP6 for the EC, looking at converging technologies and how this converges into treatments and people. This project is another stage of that research, moving on from looking at how these new technologies are being governed."