The Future of Medicine
When I started this blog last May, I wanted a place to write freely about my obsessions. I’ve always been curious about the big picture questions in life. Why are we here? What are we to make of this existence? What are our relationships to one another and the things we surround ourselves with? The way I phrased it on my twitter profile was “I write about the nexus of science/medicine, spirituality, & technology.”
“I can’t figure out what your theme is,” said a colleague of mine who had happened upon my posts early on. He was right. They were a bit scatter shot. I wrote about nuclear energy and transhumanism, then about meditation and bio-observant devices.
As the posts matured, however, almost everything that interests me convened around one topic. Which is why I’ve decided to land a theme and stick to it. The future of medicine.
As a physician, I don’t think enough attention is paid to the emerging technologies that are changing how diseases are recognized and treated, and which, as a result, are changing what it means to be human. Just fifty years ago, no one could have imagined that the higher life expectancies from modern treatments for heart disease—a bevy of medications and cardiac stents in those who have heart attacks—would shift the demographics of death. More people are living long enough to have cancer. Or that tracheostomy tubes would extend the dying process for a legion of feeble, elderly people accumulating bedsores and antibiotic resistant infections in skilled nursing facilities nationwide, often without their full knowledge.
Medical technologies have unintended consequences, both positive and negative. These technologies often arrive to physicians without clear instructions on whom they should be used and whom not. I wish to pay particular attention to how medicine in the future will alter our understanding of who we are and why we are here. But I don’t want to restrict these musings to just patients. The role and responsibilities of physicians will also change, as exampled recently by the advent of the electronic medical record. Artificial intelligence will be a boon and a threat to physicians, a concept that we should grapple with today.
Very often, particularly in America, technologies arise and begin to be utilized before we even know if they’re warranted and before we understand what else changes when we use them. We need to have discussions in the here and now in order to anticipate how medicine will shape what it means to be a patient, a doctor, a next of kin. We need to anticipate the good and the bad in our collective medical futures as a means to empower ourselves with some degree of foresight about the things to come. Otherwise, medicine will suffer the fate of other present day non-medical technologies—social media, electronic voting, surveillance devices—whose consequences we only belatedly recognize, often after they are thoroughly embedded into our day to day habits. This is the moment to challenge the techno-optimism that comes with the seductive idea that every new medical breakthrough is in our best interest. I don’t want to come across as a Luddite, however. There will be generous praise for emerging technologies in these writings. I just hope my posts will take a balanced view of what the future of medicine will look like.