As a kid growing up in the American Midwest, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of pioneer life. Along with explaining how cheese and butter are made, how a sod house is built, and how it feels to ride in a covered wagon over the frozen Mississippi, she described sickness, including a bout of fever ‘n ague (what we now know as malaria). The pioneers were convinced that malaria came from bad night air or eating watermelons, when today we know the disease is typically spread by mosquito.
Which current medical practices or beliefs will seem absurd or outmoded in the future? Some ideas:
- Conventional, invasive open surgery
- Late diagnosis of pancreatic cancer
- Understanding and treatment of the many current idiopathic disorders, such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
- Nonspecific treatments:
- Psychiatric drugs that affect global neurotransmitter levels without being able to target specific cells/circuits
- Hemispherectomy to treat epilepsy–half the brain is disconnected without being able to save the functional parts of that hemisphere
- Nonspecific cancer treatments that harm healthy cells
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- Why the boom in cancer nanotechnology?
- Microfluidics for studying cancer metastasis
- Sangeeta Bhatia and micro-liver chips on NOVA
Future old wives’ tales of health and sickness
As a kid growing up in the American Midwest, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of pioneer life. Along with explaining how cheese and butter are made, how a sod house is built, and how it feels to ride in a covered wagon over the frozen Mississippi, she described sickness, including a bout of fever ‘n ague (what we now know as malaria). The pioneers were convinced that malaria came from bad night air or eating watermelons, when today we know the disease is typically spread by mosquito.
Which current medical practices or beliefs will seem absurd or outmoded in the future? Some ideas:
Related posts: