Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
1-4
pubmed:dateCreated
1995-5-24
pubmed:abstractText
Modern images have became essential to our daily work because they provide high quality representations which, with admittedly some difficulties and pitfalls, allow detection and diagnosis of lesions and moreover inspire and guide every step of surgery. This place and value of the image as the main source of technical information required for the patient's management is straightforward and raises no major epistemological problem. However our use of images easily escapes critical thinking. Images may impose their own power and rationality. Medical images are powerful for the patient and for the doctor because they contain an unlimited source of explanation for the disease, they make disease and functional complaints, comprehensible. They are important for the surgeons because they offer an unique and irreplaceable guide to the lesions, they make it visible, they give shape and in fact reality to what in the patient, belongs to surgery. This power of medical images is irrefutable because, rather than mere representations, they are analogical reflexions of the real body with its real lesions, there is an ontological continuity between image and reality. For these and some other reasons we are tempted to give to images a consideration which should be due only to the patient himself. This temptation is idolatrous in nature. Under a number of different aspects this temptation pervades the entire field of medicine and might ultimately narrow our vision of patients, our vision of man.
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:issn
0001-6268
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:volume
130
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
8-13
pubmed:dateRevised
2009-11-11
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
1994
pubmed:articleTitle
Images and icons.
pubmed:affiliation
Clinique Universitaire de Neurochirurgie, Hôpital Pellegrin, Bordeaux, France.
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article