In a world where your home security system can be controlled through your phone, a car can be maneuvered through a smart system, and a watch can tell you how many steps you should take in a day, it stands to reason that we are becoming far more reliant on new technological innovations to tell us how to live.
It can be a bit daunting. The world today is almost entirely different to the world of fifty years ago, and it is all down to technical advancements. Albeit, some of those advancements are needed, and none more so than in the world of medicine.
So How Is It Affecting the Medical Scene?
Technical innovation is happening all across the globe, in every area of industry, including medicine. With doctors and physicians stretched to their limits during the pandemic, various companies have been faced with the challenge of making the industry safer and more accommodating to those who operate inside of it. Technological advancement, due to its ability to take the strain off human workload and reduce human error, has been embraced and encouraged to entirely renovate the medical scene as we know it.
Changes in technology can be subtle. Take for instance something so simple as surgical retractors. These are used by surgeons to hold open an incision or a wound, or similarly hold tissues and organs out of the way during the surgery. In the last few years, they have been significantly upgraded. Now, they have the ability to take away an extra pair of hands, decreasing the human contact and risk of infection during a surgery. This upgrade is a small but significant game changer in the medical industry, and it proves that sometimes technological upgrades can better the landscapes in ways we had not considered before. You can click here to learn more about these new self-retaining retractor designs.
There are so many more examples of innovation in medicine. 3D printing, for instance, has found a long list of potential uses in surgery, while every year sees new vaccines and treatments make their way out into the world.
When Can Progress Cause Controversy?
Other, more unconventional changes can be a bit more concerning. There have been advancements made to create a more robotic system in hospitals and care homes, which does not just take away a pair of hands, but essentially eliminates the need for human contact completely. Here, more ethical problems can arise, as there are a number of people who would object to their loved ones being looked after by a system rather than a human capable of human emotions and changes in consequence. The lack of ability to improvise during operation, which could lead to a gray area of culpability, is a subject that must also be considered and solved before any sort of change begins to take hold on a global scale.
There will be advancements, as in any industry, which can have both a positive and negative impact. This is why we must be aware of what is happening, both ethically and practically, in order to understand the ideal pastures to move the medical scene into.
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