|
|
|
|
|
|
by Udo
4773 days ago
|
|
|
I don't disagree in principle, but as a fellow biomedical/hacker hybrid I'd like to point out that the notion of doctors and nurses saving lives is probably too simplistic for the purpose of this discussion. I see research as the sole enabling factor for saving lives and healing people in general. It's very important that there are people out there applying our knowledge, but it's also painfully clear that we still have a long, long way to go in giving doctors the tools necessary to actually save a patient from cancer. We have managed to make some modest gains in life expectancy of cancer patients, but it bears repeating that there is no cure. Modern medicine likes to gloss over the fact that there is no cure for most serious diseases, sometimes the desire to finding a cure can even be ridiculed as "unnatural" by some practitioners. With a few notable exceptions, hospital doctors don't do a lot of scientific research - if they're researching at all it's mostly what I would call engineering research. Not that this isn't important, too, but the potential to actually save lives largely rests in the hands of other people, such as biomedical researchers, but also increasingly computer scientists. Of course you're right in asserting that without implementers such as doctors and nurses there would be no lives saved. But let's de-emphasize the romantic notion of the life-saving doctor a bit, because scientific advances are really the force that makes all medical treatment possible. |
|
|
The best example is chronic myelogenous leukemia. Before Gleevec was launched, the 5 year survival rate was 30%. Now? It's into the mid-90s and basically the same as the general population.
And Gleevec isn't the only drug that has changed the natural progression of cancer. There are drugs in the pipeline that will basically "cure" other types of cancer as well.