“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
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This is exactly the procedure my dad had for Parkinson's. It gave him some relief, and obviously seems to have worked for the woman in the article, but there's a slightly sinister, opaque relationship between Medtronic, the company that produces the equipment, and the institutions offering the surgery. Aside from the cost, hundreds of thousands of dollars, there's a creepy eagerness for patients - patients are research subjects, and the hospitals (my father went to UCSF) compete with one another for firsts in how the procedure is completed. Innovation that benefits the patient is tied up with competition and capital gain, which might be an obvious point, but it's not one that's ever made in the glossy texts that Medtronic packages with its equipment; those are pamphlets with smiling elderly people swinging grandchildren around and playing golf, depictions of idyllic relationships and such that are quite similar to the way CNN pictures the woman.
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