We often fail to appreciate the
marvels of modern medicine. What would have been considered
"miracles" once upon a time are now merely routine.
That magic combination of
Ethambutol, isoniazid, pyrazinamide, and rifampicin worked for me just fine as
it does for millions. No
need to go for Second Line or Third Line therapies.
Ordinary housewives are living
ordinary lives taking care of their kids while having been a patient with CML
for over a decade. And they have no obvious external physical indicators of
their being cancer patients. The miracle medicine is of course Glivec.
Patients are routinely cured from
acute leukemia through the use of bone marrow transplants.
Former U.S. Congresswoman from
Aizona Gabby Giffords was shot point blank and had a bullet pass through her
brain but modern trauma care including craniotomy saved her life.
Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS in
his early 20s and doctors told him that he would probably live for another year
or two. He continues to live and he is now a septuagenarian.
Thousands of cardiac and thoracic
surgeries are performed routinely every year with minimally invasive techniques
which ensures that the patient returns to a normal life that lasts decades.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton
underwent a quadruple heat bypass surgery in 2004 and therefore returned to a normal
life. Then he had another procedure in 2012 where two stents were placed in one of his coronary
arteries. He continues to lead a normal life. Even sicker heart patients
such as Dick Cheney continue to live with heart transplants.
Cardiac and thoracic surgeons
indeed have an extensive set of medical procedures available to them to repair
cardiac arteries.
Kidney transplants from living
donors are standard procedures for patients with end stage renal disease and
live for decades thereafter.
Hip replacement surgeries are commonplace and unremarkable and
yet they improve the quality of life of patients for decades. There are many other cutting edge treatments available with Apollo Hospitals, one of the largest healthcare groups in Asia.
The availability of many
anti-retroviral medicines has made HIV-AIDS a manageable disease and no longer
a certain death sentence.
These are but the slightest taste
of the present state of the art in modern medical science.
On The Horizon
The future might bring routine sequencing of every patient’s
genome in the quest for “precision medicine." As we sequence more of
our genomes and generate terabytes of data, technologies such as the IBM Watson will help analyze that data. Here's
one instance of trying to teach Oncology to Watson. Of course, Watson
could as well be "trained" to be a cardiologist. Amounts of data that
need to be crunched in healthcare to understand the human body and to offer
better treatment for diseases is increasing but happily, the cost of computing
power is ever decreasing.
Gene Therapies will become better understood and be
used more in the future. There are many targeted cancer therapies already in use.
Of course, challenges remain for
modern medical science. 1) People still die; so, there's no cure to death as of now. But
researchers are working on it. 2) Common cold still exists. 3)
Men still go bald and there's no definite treatment for it. 4) That uncomfortable
problem of hemorrhoids still refuses to yield to modern
medical science.
Ray Kurzweil's predictions about our
transhuman future are well known. People including Kurzweil have also chosen to
put faith in cryonics, the idea of preserving one's whole body or just the
brain upon one's death in the hope that at some point in the future, medical
technologies will advance to a level so that whatever may have killed the
person earlier will be curable in the future and the person can be
"revived."
So book your tank at a cryonics
company if you want to be alive 1,000 years from now. Kurzweil predicts "technological singularity" to
occur around 2045. Of course, not everyone buys into his idea.
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