APPLICATION OF CYBERNETICS TO THE HEALTH SCIENCES AND ITS ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

The question bothering on the application and implication of cybernetics to the health sciences have not only been of special interest to academics but have also received myriad of interventions by scholars from different academic backgrounds. The present paper contributes to this growing scholarship by exploring the benefits of cybernetics in the promotion of global health and the bioethical implications of such benefits. The paper claims that as cybernetics evolves, physicians have appropriated support systems with intelligent and adaptive features to help them in many diagnostic and treatment tasks. These artificial systems, the paper contends, use very efficient arti?cial neural network and fuzzy logic algorithms that have tremendously assisted physicians and their patients around the world. Specifically, these improvements have helped clinicians in decisionmaking, to offer an accurate diagnosis or to deliver a better treatment resulting in the possibility to develop new approaches for a higher quality in healthcare systems. However, as is usually the case with high-technology developments, the application of cybernetics to medicine has also given rise to many ethical issues. Based on this, this investigation will follow the following course of actions: identify some of the bioethical issues generated by the application of cybernetics to medicine and recommends that while the increasing application of hi-tech machine in the promotion of health is a welcomed development, it is also crucial to address the bioethical concerns that surround these applications.