Photorefractive Keratectomy
Well, I certainly did not expect to be completely incapacitated for four days, but such is the price one pays for having thin corneas, apparently.
On Wednesday afternoon, I underwent photorefractive keratectomy. It was a fascinating experience on many levels. First, and most obviously, having your eyes partially numbed, drawn upon, propped open, scraped, and then burned is a slightly terrifying experience. It was in some ways better and in some ways worse than I expected.
But, while that all makes for good gross-out and pity stories, it is not what was most fascinating about my short visit. If one steps back and takes in the episode in its larger context, it is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
What immediately struck me was that, despite my natural reflexes to recoil from such Medieval-sounding activities, I was surprisingly willing to trust these total strangers to jab things into my eyes. And I got that acceptance not from the knowledge of protection by guardian angels, nor from the comfort of an imaginary friend, nor the from intercession of an omnipotent being, nor even from the full faith and credit of a well-intentioned government.
This acceptance came from my knowledge that these people standing over me were standing on the shoulders of giants. While I did indeed trust that these individuals were well-trained, experienced, competent, caring professionals, these qualities by themselves amount to little more than good intentions, something mankind has had since we first stood upright (usually yielding results somewhat less inspiring).
What I was really trusting were science and the free market. These folks, like all others, were forgetful, clumsy, careless, imperfect, fallible creatures. But, luckily for me, they did not merely think they could pull off this miraculous feat because it seemed plausible. They were instead shrewdly employing the combined advances in metallurgy, glass-making, machining, manufacturing, computing, chemistry, optics, physics, biology, and countless other fields in order to make me see better.
So, instead of two well-intentioned tinkerers poking and prodding, what I was really trusting was thousands of years of experiment, invention, exploration, argument, competition, teamwork, independent confirmation, profits, and losses all brought to bear on countless propositions, theories, processes, and inventions all created for different purposes and proven and improved countless times.
This market of ideas, technologies, and processes has been sorting the good from the bad in so many times and places that truly astounding results have emerged. And these results are immeasurably more robust, complex, and sophisticated than anything any one person or group of people could have ever produced in a million times the given time-span.
Given the task of “make Mike’s eyes see things more clearly using a procedure lasting less than five minutes and costing less than three ounces of gold,” there is no amount of prayer, no amount of good intentions, no amount of coordinated central planning, no amount of pooled resources that could have ever, in all of eternity, brought it about but through the crucible of the scientific method and the natural selection of free market capitalism.
For these two things I am eternally grateful.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Well said, and impressive. I must say, though, you are one of the few people I know that could have taken this procedure and turned it into something of religion, without mentioning God, and into something of capitalism and free market.