For most people, the doctor visit hasn’t changed in decades. Same physical waiting rooms, same paper forms to fill out, same slow, expensive tests and marginally-effective, maximally-invasive treatments. But that’s about to change, as a wave of new technologies drag medicine into the 21st century. Among the most interesting:
Digitized research. Instead of laboriously searching for medicines in the natural world, today’s scientists use algorithms to design thousands of chemicals and ‘labs on a chip’ to test them quickly and accurately. The result: processes that used to take years now take months, weeks, or days, resulting in a tidal wave of powerful new drugs in various stages of development.
Cheap, fast tests. Many of today’s medical tests require the culturing of cells in a lab to get enough genetic material to analyze. For example, testing for sepsis (a common, extremely dangerous infection) might take three days and cost $2,000. But several start-ups are introducing advanced molecular diagnostic tools that can test for sepsis in few hours for less than $100. Lots of other tests are being simplified in this way.
This post was published at DollarCollapse on APRIL 21, 2017.
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