Computers are  revolutionizing  the  medical

          field!  With the growth of computer technology in the past thirty

          years, the medical feild has grown increasingly more dependent on

          them.  Traditionally the use of computers in medicine was

          administrative but recently computers have played a more active

          role.  Technological advances, generated though experimentation

          by organizations like NASA, in the feild of robotics are being

          used to help the disabled.  Computers are being applied to

          research and are even assisting the physician in his diagnosis of

          patients.  Surgeons are finding computer graphic a very useful

          tool to prepare and assist him in surgery.  With the advances in

          medicine one must look at another important aspect of these new

          uses of the computer, how much faith are humans putting in

          computers?  Who is in control the man or the machine?


               The health care feild is a buisness like any other buisness

          that provides a service and subsiquenty are subject to alot of

          paper work.  There are employee paychecks to be writen and

          recorded, bills to be tabulated and sent, inventories of drugs

          and equipment to be taken, and patient records to be updated and

          filed.  Without the computer all such related administrative

          tasks would have to be handled seperately by several people.  The

          computer has made it easier, quicker, and more efficiant to




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          complete the tasks required to run an effective administration.

          Patient records, with the use of computers, have become easy to

          up date and are easily transfered from one hospital to another,

          all that is required is two terminals, two modems, and a

          telephone.  Computers are used to organize and schedual operating

          rooms as well as patient hospital rooms.  Preparing a patient's

          final bill would take some time to prepare but hospitals can now

          add up hospital costs, costs of a room per day, medication,

          operating costs ect., review insurance policies and subtract its

          coverage from the patients bill all in a fraction of the time it

          would take to do by hand.


               Vast amounts of research have become possible with the use

          of computers.  In much of science research the researcher must

          keep track of many different controls and changes.  The computer

          has made it possible to research more complex controls.  Advances

          in computer graphics are helping researchers discover the

          mysteries of the human brain.  Before the invention of

          CAT(Computer assisted tomography) scans, PET(Positron emission

          tomography) scans, and NMR(Nuclear magnetic resonance scans, the

          surgeon knew only general regions of function in the brain.  CAT

          scans provided the surgeon with a visual image of the patient's

          brain before surgery and therefore allowed the surgeon to be

          better prepared for his operation.  CAT scans are not however

          limited to the brain, CAT scans are primarily used to locate

          cancer throughout the entire body.  The CAT scan is a machine

          that X-rays a given area from many different angles.  The images



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          are then recorded and processed in a computer which is able to

          use the data to create a three dimentional picture of the area.

          Recently further advances in computer technology have shed new

          insight in brain research.  The BEAM machine is a new computer

          that generates computer video images, its capabilities go beyond

          those of the CAT.  BEAM creates a multi color image of the brain,

          the different colors indica