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The usual suspects: why techno-fixing dementia is flawed

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Abstract

Dementia is highly prevalent and up until now, still incurable. If we may believe the narrative that is currently dominant in dementia research, in the future we will not have to suffer from dementia anymore, as there will be a simple techno-fix solution. It is just a matter of time before we can solve the growing public health problem of dementia. In this paper we take a critical stance towards overly positive narratives of techno-fixes by placing our empirical analysis of dementia research protocols and political statements in a framework of technology assessment. From this perspective, it becomes obvious that a techno-fix is just one of many ways to approach societal problems and more importantly that technologies are way less perfect than they are presented. We will argue that this narrow scope, which focusses on the usual suspects for solving illnesses, reduces dementia to organismic aspects, and may be counterproductive in finding a cure for dementia. We conclude with outlining how the narrow scope can be balanced with other narratives and why we should have a reasonable scepticism towards the usual suspects.

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Notes

  1. Dementia is a term used to describe various symptoms of cognitive decline such as forgetfulness, but is not a disease itself. Dementia is a symptom, caused by progressive neuro-degenerative diseases, of which Alzheimer’s disease is the most well known and most widely studied.

  2. A more general analysis that focuses on Dutch dementia research protocols and on the exclusion criteria used in research trials, as well as a detailed description of the data analysis of the empirical data is to be found in Jongsma KR, van Bruchem-Visser RL, van de Vathorst S and Mattace-Raso FUS. Has dementia research lost sense of reality?—A descriptive analysis of eligibility criteria of Dutch dementia research protocols. Neth J Med. 2016, Jun;74(5):201-9.

  3. The following search terms were used: dement*, cognitive decline, Alzheimer*, Parkinson*, Lewy body* LBD*, familial dement*, frontotempor*, and vascular dement*.

  4. For American politicians, for instance, it was mandatory to take the results of Mihail Roco’s and William Bainbridge’s report Converging technologies for improving human performance into account, which was published 15 years ago and highly influential on the American National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) (see Roco and Bainbridge 2003; Rip and Voß 2013; Simakova and Coenen 2013).

  5. Evgeny Morozov (2011) has pointed out that Weinberg’s controversial essay is still topical today, above all because many technologist still believe in Weinberg’s initial idea. He writes with regard to Google’s research efforts: ‘This [Weinberg’s] debate is still raging today, in part because Google, founded by a duo of extremely ambitious engineers on a crusade to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, “has put the production of technological fixes on something of an industrial scale. […] Name a problem that has to deal with information, and Google is already on top of it.’.

  6. It is ironic that the WHO aims to deal with it by ‘fostering innovation and research and development of new vaccines, diagnostics, infection treatment options and other tools.’ (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs194/en/).

  7. It can be suggested that this bias partially originates from the circumstances of the engineering education, which is mostly concerned with the technical side of the coin does not offer interdisciplinary training.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R.L van Bruchem-Visser for her contribution to the initial analysis of empirical data. Karin Jongsma received a grant to conduct the initial analysis of the empirical data from the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMW) with No. 40-41500-98-99002. The funder had no influence on the design, methods, subject recruitment, data collections, analysis and preparation of the paper. We also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments have helped us to improve earlier versions of the manuscript.

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    1. Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, Humboldtallee 36, 37073, Göttingen, Germany

      Karin Rolanda Jongsma

    2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), Karlstraße 11, 76133, Karlsruhe, Germany

      Martin Sand

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    Karin Rolanda Jongsma and Martin Sand have contributed equally to this paper.

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    Jongsma, K.R., Sand, M. The usual suspects: why techno-fixing dementia is flawed. Med Health Care and Philos 20, 119–130 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-016-9747-9

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