Earlier this week, I watched some online videos that were both sickening and inspiring. They showed a team of surgeons conducting colorectal, cardiac and neurological procedures—scalpels, blood and all. But instead of crowding around the patient in an operating theatre, as shown in TV shows such as ER, the surgeons were scattered: some were beside the patient; others were many miles away, guiding their colleagues with a (virtual) hand, thanks to augmented reality.
Call this, if you like, Zoom for surgeons—instead of conducting an office meeting via video, they are inserting a scalpel into a brain. Or as Naine Hachach-Haram, a plastic surgeon in the UK’s NIS and the founder of Proximie, the platform I watched, says, “The idea is to bring virtual healthcare workers together—we are digesting the operating theatre and bringing it to people around the world.”
Welcome to another unexpected story arising from Covid-19. Hachach-Haram first proposed the idea of doing virtual surgery a decade ago. Like many doctors in the west, she did volunteer medical work in war-torn regions of the world and became frustrated by the lack of access to surgeons there. To correct this, in 2016 she founded Proximie as a training tool. However, in those early days, she said she faced an uphill battle persuading other doctors to embrace the idea: most had been trained to believe that “proper surgery involved proximity to the patient”. The roadblock “was a cultural issue as much as an issue of technology”, she tells me.
This reflects a bigger pattern that has benefited many telemedicine start-ups. “Covid-19 caused a rapid increase in virtual healthcare use,” says a recent report from consultancy McKinsey, who predicts this level of growth will decline when lockdown ends, but says telemedicine “is expected to stabilize at higher than pre-pandemic levels and continue growing”. To put it another way now that the cultural resistance to virtual medicine has been broken down, we are unlikely to forget this lesson. “Zoom surgery” is likely to remain a feature of modern medicine.
This might just be a lucky accident. Or maybe not: a similar pattern has played out in pockets of finance too. In 2007, a telecoms company in Kenya launched M-Pesa, a mobile payment system, to get around the lack of established banking infrastructure in Africa. The concept, which was embraced in Kenya, faced cultural resistance in the West but would come to be eventually adopted later. When historians look beck at the Covid-19 era, they may not just conclude that it changed how we work but that it also accelerate the movement of skills, ideas and money. Those videos of “Zoom Surgery” are one tiny symbol of a new type of globalization.
8. When conducting a “Zoom surgery” doctors ________.
A.gather around the patient | B.hold an online meeting beforehand |
C.work in different locations at the same time | D.do the operation with the assistance of robots |
9. What can we know about Proximie?
A.The only challenge it faced was the cultural resistance from doctors. |
B.It originated from a traditional idea. |
C.Travel bans during the Covid-19 lockdowns blocked its development. |
D.It is a platform for sharing expertise and conducting online procedures. |
10. What does the underlined phrase “a similar pattern” refer to?
A.Western people are resistant to change. |
B.Smart ideas were usually initiated in the west. |
C.People in less developed regions need more help. |
D.A new idea was first developed in poorer regions. |
11. Which can be a suitable title for the text?
A.The rise of virtual surgery | B.Globalized augmented reality |
C.Medical care after the pandemic | D.Telemedicine changed how we work |