International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care

Table of Contents - 1986 - Volume 2, Issue 01  

Technology Assessment: Policy, Clinical, and Methodological Issues

Assessment and the Technologic Present

Stanley Joel Reisera1

a1 The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Do we have the will, the power of innovation, to lift ourselves above our own creations and control them? This is the central question of modern medicine, a question which for some time has dominated current discourse in health care and which gave rise in the early 1970s to the field of technology assessment. The technologic armory that has been developed over the past one and a half centuries is vast, formidable, and expanding. Its presence must be reckoned with, and to do this we must begin by understanding our relationship to it.