Dr. Jones: The new technology dubbed telemedicine will provide sustained improvement in at least rural patient care since it allows rural physicians to televise medical examinations to specialists who live at great distances -- specialists who will thus be able to provide advice the rural patient would otherwise not receive. Dr. Carabella: Not so. Telemedicine might help rural patient care initially. However, small hospitals will soon realize that they can minimize expenses by replacing physicians with technicians who can use telemedicine to transmit examinations to large medical centers, resulting in fewer patients being able to receive traditional, direct medical examination. Eventually, it will be the rare individual who ever gets truly personal attention. Hence, rural as well as urban patient care will suffer.
Dr. Carabella uses the strategy of describing the application of the technology discussed by Dr. Jones as one step that initiates a process that leads to an undesirable end in responding to Dr. Jones.