The Aesthetics of Diabetes
It's not so great. From Aiming for Grace, the blog I quoted in my Atlantic column.
The more I think about the sorry state of health care aesthetics, the more I think part of the problem is that we have an "acute care" model of medicine in a world where chronic diseases are increasingly the rule. If you only go to the doctor occasionally, you won't care nearly as much about how things look as you will if you're spending a large part of your life in clinics of various sorts. The same is true of medical devices. A diabetic who uses a pump all the time for life will benefit far more from something that looks good than someone who has a one-time, or even short-term, encounter with some kind of medical gizmo.