In Dan Brown’s novel Origin, he explores the uncanny relationship between human beings and technology. In the novel, a futurist named Edmond Kirsch designs an evolutionary-based computer model that makes accurate predictions about the future of mankind.
According to Kirsch’s model, technology will eventually establish its own kingdom as a non-living species.
This kingdom will ultimately consume the human species, creating a hybrid of artificial and biological beings who live symbiotically.
Albeit slightly dramatic, this prediction sheds some light on the various aspects of technology, including its current and upcoming role in our global society.
This blog will discuss technology’s role in healthcare, and how this role is largely shaped by the broader cultural shifts that exist in society.
Where did we come from and where are we now?
In prehistoric times, in a digitally-barren land, the cause of disease was often deemed to be supernatural. Boring a hole into a patient’s skull was therefore a common treatment for epilepsy, headaches, and mental illness.
During the middle ages, barbers were also conveniently the towns’ surgeons who performed amputations and bloodletting, a blood-withdrawing procedure intended to cure disease.
The later invention of the printing press enabled the spread of knowledge, contributing to medicine’s evolution. This progress was later augmented by the industrial revolution, a transitional period in history marked by the wide use of machinery and mass production.
It was during this period that the stethoscope, medicine’s notorious trademark, was invented. The industrial revolution, largely manifesting the cultural shift of the time, continued to inspire inventions like the ophthalmoscope and later on, the electrocardiogram.
Fast forward to today, the progress of technology continues to revolutionize the practice of medicine.
Take, for example, the advent of Wi-Fi.
Access to a physician is not always possible, but access to Wi-Fi usually is. Healthcare took advantage of its development by adopting telemedicine, a simple platform connecting humans to the digital realm—a realm that today occupies much of our waking life anyway.
Preventing millions of kilometers of health-related travel, the potential of telemedicine is immense for people in the developing world and those who live in rural communities.
As consumers of healthcare, patients are increasingly seeking the latest technologies for their diagnoses and treatments, just as they’re seeking the latest iPhone. Technologies like MRI and PET scans are used to make informative decisions about the progress of disease, and hole-drilling is rarely a viable solution.
Wearable technologies—from the Apple Watch to Hexoskin’s Smart Kits—are flooding the market.
These wearables record body metrics like breathing rate and cardiac activity, and are paving the way towards preventative medicine, which seeks to prevent illness or at least treat it at its immediate onset. They are also acting as vital bridges between remote communities and physicians who can observe patients’ results from a distance.
Our increasing day-to-day reliance on technology has clearly infiltrated—and will certainly continue to infiltrate—the healthcare realm.
Where are we going?
Fascinating fields, like precision and preventative medicine, are taking proactive measures to build and transform our current healthcare models. Using precision medicine, doctors can use a patient’s genetic makeup to better predict the path that disease will take. A target treatment is then administered and redundant procedures are avoided.
Bertalan Meskó, a physician with a keen interest in genomics and science fiction technologies, has made some interesting predictions about the future of medicine.
Meskó believes that the continued expansion of wearables and portable technologies will cause significant shifts in healthcare. Rather than treating patients in traditional settings like hospitals, examinations and treatments will be made more portable. Hospitals will also no longer be the primary owners of health data. Instead, this ownership will belong to the individual who makes use of the data-generating technologies. Health insurance companies will also face novel challenges and inevitable shifts in their approach. Meskó even suggests a revised Hippocratic oath that acknowledges the value of medical technologies.
In continuing to resemble society’s fluctuating culture, the possibilities of future technologies—in healthcare and all other realms—are endless.
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