RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30957, 13 January 1966, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

COM PUJ PAT I ENTS

The professor of medicine at Oxford University suggested that within 10 years patients would be able to by-pass a doctor’s surgery and consult a computer instead. Professor Sir George Pickering said: “There may be a time when patients will be able to go to a computer, put some money in a slot, feed it with the details of their disorders and get prescriptions out of the bottom of it.”—News item. This could, of course be the complete answer to the rising cost of New Zealand’s health services. Its a wonderful thought—instead of a waiting room full of sniffling and wheezing patients, a row of happy

people playing the machines. Better, in some ways, than going to the TAB.

Everything points to such a scheme being a success: Sir George avers that the computer would have a better brain than a doctor. But there is at least one snag—the competition among women to claim attention. It is sometimes only the utmost difficulty that a woman is dissuaded from showing her operation. Women are intensely proud of their operations, and like to talk about them. Also about their many and various ailments. So what is going to happen? Mrs A goes along to -he computer, knowing fui. well that she

has some minor affliction which'science will probab.T say (on the card whick emerges from the machined should be treated with dill water. But she knows Mrs B has had a rare case of Derbyshire neck and inevitably she will want to go one better, so will throve in a few symptoms which don’t really belong. A determined woman could confuse the most elaborate computer. Urticaria sounds far more interesting than sinus, pyrexia much more romantic than flat feet. But who knows? The cunning of science today may be equal to the demand, and may have some sort of in-built condenser to devaluate the information put into it by women patients. It would be a marvellous machine.