A Personal Meditation on Technology, Sustainabity, and Social Context

I have cancer, but thanks to modern medicine, in terms of health it may be no big deal. The surgeon will use a scalpel to remove a thin layer of tissue from the floor of the mouth along with a tiny bit of the connection to the tongue. Then a laser will cauterize it, minimizing bleeding, killing microorganisms that stray from my mouth into the wound, and sealing off nerve endings, reducing soreness. The surgeon has asked me several times not refer to this as a "slice & sear". Since the odds are the cancer is encapsulated, they will send me home with painkillers and antibiotics. After a week or two, that will probably be that.

But it takes a truckload of advanced technology to make this no big deal. Before anesthesia was first invented in the 19th century, the shock and pain of the operation might have killed me (assuming a pre-anesthesia dentist or doctor could have diagnosed the problem at this early a stage). Today's anesthetics have much lower odds of killing me than ether would have. Similarly, large scale commercial production of antibiotics was an early 20th century invention. Lasers only became useful for medical procedures beyond eye surgery in the late 20th century.

People like Derrick Jensen, who want to eliminate technology, want to let me, along with billions of other people, die. Since extreme anti-tech sentiment is small — but with an intense following — it is worth engaging a bit.

One argument is the kind of treatment I'm getting is expensive. Jensen and others would argue that we can't afford modern medical treatment for everybody, and should use the resources to provide a more basic low-tech level of care. Now I can confirm that treating cancer is expensive from personal experience. I pay $600 per month for insurance. Between copayments and deductibles, treatment will cost me about $2,000. Adding what the insurance company will pay brings total social cost to between $6,000 and $8,000.

This ignores social context. The Netherlands provides as good or better quality health care than I'll get in the U.S for a bit more than half the cost in the U.S.[1]. In addition, in the Netherlands I would not have been stuck with a third of the cost all at once, but would have had it included over the years in tax bills. Out of pocket cost for me would have been well under $100. If you have something against the Netherlands, you can find a large number of nations where medical costs are lower and medical quality is higher than the U.S., mostly because they use various means to prevent their residents from insurer milking – including socialized medicine, single payer insurance, and public/private hybrids that include a large public component and tough consistent regulation of private insurance companies.


Cuba suffers shortages of certain medical equipment and supplies, due largely to the U.S. sanctions against them. Although Cuba's economy is highly flawed it produces enough goods for export that it could easily afford to buy any medical goods it cannot make itself, if allowed to do so. In fact Cuba has enough high tech equipment that it earns income by treating medical tourists with them.



We can provide not only medical care sustainably, but all of our needs and many of our wants if we choose to. But to do this we have to understand that we have a cancer that needs to be overcome. To be a cancer survivor our species needs to stop saying: "Cancer, Schmancer as long as we're healthy."



[3] International Database queried for 2010 world Life Expectancy by country. http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/region.php. Accessed 11-May-2011. Note IDB database does not let you save queries. You must repeat query yourself after reaching link.

[4] Chung, Jeanette W. and David O. Meltzer. 2009. "Estimate of the Carbon Footprint of the US Health Care Sector". JAMA: 302(18):1970-1972.  

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