| doctor_my_eye@msn.com 2005-08-09, 6:00 pm |
| Glenn, even you have to admit that this case presents a lot of
interesting medical ethics issues to the front. The re-treatment rate
for Alcon's Ladarvision is consistently higher than the rate for any
other competitive system. This cannot be written off by saying that
Alcon lasers just had more wackos. These machines are programmed by
humans to follow certain algorithms and mathematical models of the eye
that might have been defective from their inception to cause higher and
more drastic errors. The Alcon people may have simply "bet on the wrong
horse." They believed that their technobabble was more accurate than
the technobabble of the VISX laser or the B&L Laser, and they are now
paying for the consequences of that faith in their system. I find it
impossible to show this as malicious behavior with an intent to harm,
but I think every good corporate citizen needs to "fess up" when they
bet the wrong horse.
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