This Easter weekend, we're rebroadcasting our show from last season about the impact of high tech medicine on the care you receive. We also have your reaction to last week's show on healthcare as the sleeper issue of the 2011 federal election.

Below is my original blog post about the High Tech show:

If I had just a dollar for every patient I see in the ER who asks for an MRI, I'd be rich. Patients and doctors alike have bought into an assumption that more and better technology makes for better health care.

This week, we examine the role technology plays in health care and ask whether more tech in medicine means less craft. As medical historian Stanley Reiser says on the show, the debate over tech versus craft is as old as the stethescope.

On second thought, we shouldn't be dreading the future - especially when you find out the kinds of breakthroughs that are just around the corner.

Case in point: Think off-the-shelf body parts are science fiction? Within our lifetimes, we may be ordering new kidneys from a store or a catalog. Researchers at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina were the first in the world to custom build a replacement bladder in a lab and transplant it successfully into a human being.

There are people walking around today with laboratory-built bladders, thanks to the Institute, and its' director, Dr. Anthony Atala.

To hear my conversation with him, tune in Saturday at 11 am (11:30 am NT) and again on Monday at 11:30 am (3:30 pm NT) on CBC Radio One. Or, click below to listen to the show right now, or download the podcast: