The insidious nature of ignorance and my curiosity

There’s been a Tweet flowing through my Twitter stream for a few days now and I’ve avoided clicking on the link because I knew it would be something totally ridiculous, misleading and meaningless. Unfortunately it was a quiet Sunday morning, and while I sipped my coffee and waited for the rest of my household to come to life, I succumbed to human nature and clicked the link.

Grrr! I knew it. Something totally ridiculous, misleading and meaningless. What was I thinking? Why do I torture myself this way? One can only speculate.

The link led me to the following article: Heart Attack Survivor Says An iPad Helped Save His Life 

“…he remembered having his iPad in his bag. The tablet was a tool he had just gotten and was just beginning to use in his practice of medicine.

In seconds, he brought up the Mayo Clinic’s application to access patient electronic medical records so as to look at McMonigle’s EKG from his past heart scare. The doctors compared it to the new heart rhythms, which confirmed their suspicions that McMonigle was having an acute heart attack.

I wasn’t surprised, but was certainly disappointed. Based on the stream of Tweets and title of the article I thought for sure the iPad grew legs and pulled the man from a fire. Alas, that wasn’t the case at all. Do I really need to mention that the man had the clinical acumen to diagnose his own heart attack, or that he was standing in a room full of physicians? The iPad had nearly nothing to do with saving the mans life. Why not credit the highly trained healthcare professionals for acting quickly, or the healthcare system that had the foresight to build an EHR that lends itself to mobile access, or the millions of dollars worth of advanced healthcare technology that, oh I don’t know, was used to actually save the man’s life. Sheez.

Here’s an equivalent article for you: Heart Attack Survivor Says BlueTooth Mouse Helped Save His Life 

“…he remembered having his BlueTooth Mouse in his bag. The mouse was a tool he had just gotten and was just beginning to use in his practice of medicine. 

In seconds, he brought up the Mayo Clinic’s application to access patient electronic medical records so as to look at McMonigle’s EKG from his past heart scare. The doctors compared it to the new heart rhythms, which confirmed their suspicions that McMonigle was having an acute heart attack.

Sounds ridiculous, right? It’s. The. Same. Concept. This is what happens when you get a bunch of people together to write a story armed with IQ’s no bigger than the temperature on a hot summer day in the Central Valley of California. This type of hype irritates me more than you can imagine. Focusing on some small piece of consumer technology – whether Apple, Android or Windows – in a story like this goes off the must-have-been-a-slow-news-day o’meter. And people eat it up.

News worthy would have been if the guy pulled an augmented reality device from his bag, injected a few nanobots into the guy and cleared the blockage and repaired the vessel on the spot. That’s technology worth writing about.

That’s it, no more early Sunday morning reading for me. I’m sleeping in.

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