The Bioethical Implications of Medical Instrumentation: Artificial Kidney

Abstract

A technology of medicine arose in the nineteenth century with the direct application of devices and instruments to a part of the body for diagnosis and treatment. The technological innovations are a part of scientific, economic and sociological dimensions of medicine, and while easily delineated as a narrow theme in itself, it involves the broad field of bioethics. The instrumentation is neutral toward man's health, but when he falls in a disease and has a vast collection of emotional needs, he wants reassurance, he wants to be listened, he wants to feel that it makes difference to the physician whether he lives or dies. He wants to feel that he is in physician's thoughts and not only in the mechanisms of diagnosis or treatment instruments. This is the concern of modern bioethics which tries to bring the instrument closer and closer to the sick person. The artificial kidney as a specific and unique machine to treat end-stage renal disease complicates the bioethics approach to the dialysis patient because of the economical and political interferences gathered under the fourth factor of the Hippocrates' triangle. (Bioethics)