Many patients feel that physicians have come to rely too much on gadgets, have grown too mechanical in their approach. Latest advance in mechanical medicine: a machine that diagnoses disease.
Developed by French Ophthalmologist François Paycha, it is a compact, shiny affair like the business machines that keep records on punch cards. A student of cybernetics and automation, Paycha picked diseases of the cornea for his test effort. He punched hundreds of cards for the various symptoms and characteristics of corneal disease. Then he examined a patient, asked the usual questions and recorded the findings by hitting selected keys from 200 on...