Many months ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic struck a seismic blow to the routine activities of most of humanity, I had finally felt my meandering musings on this blog had rightly tethered themselves to a theme. I would hone my focus and write about the future of medicine. I recognized that both lay and specialty periodicals that examine how technology affects societies and individual behavior were neglecting future medical breakthroughs for the furtive field of thought I believed it was. My background as a physician afforded me insight into specifics about the feasibility of these technologies, but it was my interest in spirituality that made me curious about the psychological and societal implications of the widespread adoption of technologies that would alter the human experience. This naturally lends to some techno-skepticism. After all, we live in an age where time and again, non-medical technologies that were once thought to be liberating, equalizing, and progressive have in fact been shown to be manipulating, polarizing, and hazardous (I’m talking about you again, Facebook!)

Nikhil BarotAugust 17, 2020coronovirus, COVID

Future Pandemics—Today (Part 1)

I’ve been compiling a list of topics to write about on this blog for the last nine months, a to do list that’s grown so long that it now exceeds my capacity to complete them in an efficient manner. One idea about the future of medicine that I’ve been meaning to get to is the topic at hand, future pandemics, but I wasn’t sure how to approach the issue. Should I begin with a cursory review of one of the worst pandemics in history, the 1918 H1N1 flu that killed 50 million people worldwide, and segue into conjecture about what factors could make such an event easily happen again? Or should I tackle the “known unknowns” about what sort of organism might cause the event, what part of the globe it would likely come from, and what sort of damage it would do to people’s health and well-being? Alternatively, I could paint the worst-case scenario: the death of a sizable portion of humanity and the ensuing collapse of social, moral, and economic order.

Nikhil BarotFebruary 26, 2020pandemic, coronovirus, virus