"The healing power of tech: Exploring the benefits of technology in Medicine" by Rodrigo D.

Technology is improving day by day, which can benefit everything we know, including medicine.I will be talking about how technology affects and can affect future healthcare and medicine, as it is an important area in society. I chose this topic because healthcare is in constant growth, even in techniques, or the technologies used. Technology is evolving all over the world, but as medicine is essential for life, every change in it can mean the safety of the population, as finding cures for fatal diseases, or easier ways to treat someone.

 To start with, many technologies are developed with different methods, but the question is, How do different types of technology help in medicine? Technology can help in healthcare with robotics. As reported by Advent Health University, “Robots are programmed to perform a variety of critical functions, such as interacting with patients, reviewing patients’ living conditions, operating in dangerous and emergency situations, conducting data mining to increase a pharmacy’s efficiency, and disinfecting hospital rooms”. Different technologies can also help during medical applications because many things, as stated by Jama Network, including the use of information-age technologies such as 3-dimensional (3D) visualization, robotics, teleoperation, and computer-assisted manipulation allow the awkward motions of minimally invasive procedures to be translated into natural hand motions from a surgical workstation. Based on remote Baires Dev Blog, remote patient monitoring (RPM) is not only a form of telehealth, however, RPM is more than just a video call to check up on symptoms or do a routine follow-up session. That’s mainly because RPM involves a variety of devices (mainly wearables) to gather the patients’ health data to later send it to their physicians. 

After noticing all this evolution, it is certain to say that modern technology is not the only thing that has helped medicine, as medicine and tech always walk hand to hand, even in the past. Many technologies have been developed for hospitals throughout the centuries, and without them, the main modern technology used in healthcare would not be possible. According to Infuse Safety, the most important invent were the stethoscope, which allowed the doctors to listen the patient heartbeat and lungs, the anesthesia, which created a painless treatment even during complex procedures, X-ray, which turned the healthcare and medical exams much easier, while it brought more space for the creation of CT (computed tomography), radiation therapy and fluoroscopy, and antibiotics, which revolutionized modern medicine, as they enabled treatment and recovery from diseases that were often fatal before. Modern medicine would not be possible if the anesthesia was also not created, as many current procedures take more than 4 hours, something impossible, as the majority of the surgeries would cause a torturous pain. Based in UMHS, some time ago people already tried to create this technique, but the dentist Willian T. G. Morton and the surgeon John Warren were who used the early form of it for the first time, in October 16, 1846. Before it’s creation, the patients were alcoholized before the medical procedures, which needed to be the fastest possible as the pain of a surgery, with no anesthesia, was agonizing.

Even if the tech in healthcare changed medicine, the main focus on patient care is the creation of cures to common diseases, so people always ask if technology makes finding cures for diseases easier. The answer for this question is more complex than it seems, as technology is changing and improving. Conforming to the Geospatial World, thanks to technology, there is better and more accessible treatment for a wide variety of diseases, better and more efficient care for the sick, and better health care and disease control. In addition, even with this treatment improvement, there is a disease that kills almost 10 million people around the world every year and does not have a stated cure: cancer. But, With the technology, this situation can change. According to NIH, “nanotechnology offers the means to target therapies directly and selectively to cancerous cells and neoplasms. With these tools, clinicians can safely and effectively deliver chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the next generation of immuno- and gene therapies to the tumor.”

This technology can be responsible in the future for saving millions of lifes, but even with all these benefits, it is important to remember that technology can be harmful if not used in the correct way. Besides, it is noticeable that with the growth of technology in healthcare, medicine is being benefited in many ways, which can influence death rates and upgrade the quality of life of people worldwide. After all the research, it is visible that technology already has many types that help in healthcare, surgeries, and patient comeback. It also improved very much the treatments and exams past the centuries, such as X-ray and stethoscope, and it even assists in disease treatment and cures. Experts even say that with the evolution of robotics, in the future the medical robots will be incredibly optimized, which will be able to complete whole medical processes with full autonomy, as told by RBR. Finally, give a chance to technology, as it can save your life one day.