Microstory 924: Medical Science Breakthroughs

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Settle in. This one is short, because I can offer little insight into this matter, and the only people who disagree with medical advancements are religious zealots whose opinions don’t matter. I’ve already talked a lot about transhumanism, and I appreciate that people may not be quite on board with such a thing, even if they understand it, because it’s a pretty high jump to that from cures and treatments. Cyborgs are ever-present in science fiction narratives, and they don’t paint a very pretty picture of the concept. People are strapped with machine guns for arms, and they’ve usually had one eye replaced with something artificial. The truth is that upgrades will be far more seamless and elegant, but I’m already digressing. In the meantime, before those wild alterations to human physiology take place, we have good old fashioned medical science to keep us alive and healthy. You might be surprised to learn that only a couple infectious diseases have been eradicated worldwide. I don’t mean that as an underexaggeration. There are literally only two of them: smallpox, and rinderpest. A few more can be eliminated if problems with funding and distribution can be solved first, but not many. The rest of the diseases have treatments, often very promising ones, but they don’t have cures. While the diseases themselves cannot be eliminated, the symptoms they cause can be handled with the right cocktail. While not ideal, pain and symptom management is an important component of wellbeing. This is set to change, which I mentioned the my entry about the spread of truth. Institutions, like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, are learning more every day. It can only get better from here, as long as we increase public access to treatment centers. I, for one, am hopeful about it, especially if we work towards the development of nanotechnology. Oh, look at that, up ahead; a post about nanotechnology.