The Clinics Learn to Say "We Are Still Reviewing" and Mean It

BOSTON — In a field that has always sold tomorrow, a quiet number of augmentation clinics have started selling honesty, and the pitch is strangely popular. As the safety review of neural-interface implants stays open and contested through 2124, practitioners are telling would-be patients what they do not yet know. "The most responsible sentence in my office is 'we are still reviewing,'" said Dr. Priya Sundaram, who runs an augmentation-counseling practice serving some of the roughly 5 percent of humans now augmented. Somaform Augmetics' founder Julian Morrow, an augmentation-rights advocate, argues the caution itself is a kind of maturity for the industry. Clinicians describe patients arriving with implant catalogs and leaving with reading lists. The trend is small and unglamorous and, its practitioners insist, the point. "Enhancement without informed consent," Sundaram said, "is just marketing with a scalpel." The waiting rooms, for once, are full of people slowing down.