Medical Robots

I got home from skiing today and found my son watching "The Empire Strikes Back." I love the Star Wars movies and so I joined in for some of the viewing. If you look at all of the movies, they are really the stories of the 2 robots: R2D2 and C3PO. Science fiction always has a use for robots but the only ones we have today are for building things, exploring other planets, or vacuuming our homes.

Yesterday I had to go to the doctor to renew a prescription. I used to never visit the doctor. Now I go quite frequently and know him well. He knows that I live in Utah and work in the Bay Area. He knows I am headed to Japan tomorrow. I know that last month he took his 3 daughters to Europe. My visit with the doctor lasted a good 20 minutes but most of the time we just talked about families and trips. I didn't mind the visit but afterwards I realized that I could have saved myself a lot of time if I could have replaced my doctor with a medical robot.

Don't get me wrong, Doctors play an important part in helping to diagnose illness and help us remain healthy. I just know that healthcare costs continue to rise and nothing our government is doing will keep that from happening. I suggest we give scientists at NASA a larger budget and have them build medial robots like the one that fixed up Luke Skywalker after his unfortunate interaction with the abominable snowman on the ice planet Hoth. When I look at all of my doctor visits over the past 3 years, only one of them really needed a physical doctor. The rest could have been to visit a robot. Most of the time when I go in, the doctor checks me over and then sends me to the medical lab next door to give a few vials of blood. Then I get a call from him the next week and he adjusts the quantity of a medication. For my visit yesterday, I just needed a prescription refill and my recent blood work from December eliminated the need to test my blood. A robot could have taken care of that for me.