I’ve been a patient in a hospital only once, and it’s an experience I hope I won’t have to repeat any time soon. That said, it was a positive experience. I went there to get a procedure and emerged healthier. And I also learned a lot about the state of modern medicine, and my suspicions about having been lied to by medical dramas were confirmed – hospitals are not staffed entirely with supermodels. Here is the primary observation that I took away from my time at the hospital: hospitals are all tubes all the time.

You can’t walk more than a few feet once you cross into a hospital ward without seeing some kind of flexible tube sticking out of some kind of medical equipment. Odds are also that you’re not likely to find a patient lying in a hospital bed who isn’t in some way intimately acquainted with plastic tubing in some way or another. And the defining characteristic of all of this tubing is that it is flexible. If humans could be programmed to sit perfectly still, flexibility wouldn’t necessarily be such an important quality of medical tubing. But because people move around so much, and because when they’re in hospitals they often have to be connected to tubing, that tubing must be able to move with them. So, the demand for flexible tubing, especially in healthcare contexts, is very high.

Industry has responded to the needs of health care with all kinds of flexible plastic tubing, most varieties of which are designed to be transparent so that their contents are visible. This allows health care providers to make sure that the transmission of fluids throughout the tubing progresses as it should. There’s no denying that plastic tubing is critically important to the health care industry.