Healthcare in future
At this moment, doctors and scientists are working on methods and vaccinations to prevent and cure certain diseases. In future these disease might not appear anymore because of all the hard work that these people have done. There might even be solutions to prevent people from dying at all! What exactly are the problems in healthcare in the future, and what are the solutions to problems we are facing know?
Cancer
Cancer is a disease that at this time accounts for 13% of all deaths. 7.6 million people died from cancer in the world during 2007. It’s very important that in future, this amount will be reduced. That’s why scientists are looking for treatments that will cure people suffering from any form of cancer.
Cancer is a largely preventable disease, this means that if you don’t expose yourself to certain risk factors, (like smoking, alcohol consumption and obesity) the risk will be smaller to develop cancer. Some other lifestyle factors known to affect the risk of developing cancer are; sexually transmitted diseases (for example the human papillomavirus), the use of exogenous hormones, exposure to radiation and certain occupational and chemical exposures.
Scientist have been working to create vaccines for all forms of cancer, an example of this is HPV, Human papillomavirus. In the year 2006 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against two forms of HPV, 16 and 18, which together cause 70% of cervical cancers, and that might cause other cancers such as anal cancer.
HPV is just one example of what studies and research are capable of. Many girls between the age of 11 and 26 are being vaccinated all over the world. People expect that the amount of girls that die from cervical cancers will be decreased in the following decades. If we continue with research to cancer, and cancer prevention methods, such as reducing the amount of cancer causing risk factors, many people will live longer. 7.6 million people could be saved from death every year.
Cryonics
Fear not death, for the sooner we die the longer we shall be immortal."
-Benjamin Franklin
In the 50 years following we won’t be able to prevent everyone from dying. But for the people that do die, there might be an chance to be reanimated in future. This option is called Cryonics. Cryonics is the preservation of living organisms at low temperature. The idea is that people, that can’t be kept alive at this time, might have a nice life in future. The persons Identity, memory and personality are sustained, because it’s al stored in the brain. However there are many ethical questions about Cryonics such as;
- What happens when reanimated people suddenly intervene in the life of future generations?
- What happens when the world is getting overpopulated?
- What about immorality?
Dr. Kenneth Iserson (director of the Arizona Bioethics Program) thinks that reanimated people won’t become immortal. When the people intervene in the general life, they will quickly start to suffer from depressions. They lost all of there friends and family and they find it hard to adapt to the modern world. Cryonics raised many questions about death, and the most important one is if we are aloud to play with it. Maybe, in 100 years, I’ll know the answer because they might have frozen me in to see what happens.
Cloning
Next to Cryonics, there is another big experiment going on at this time, that might be of great help in future, this experiment is called Cloning. It has already happened with animals, but scientists still didn’t succeed in cloning people.
Just imagine, you have to go to school but at the same time, there is this amazing party going on at your friend’s place! What should you do? Just sent your clone! (to the party of course, we don’t want to encourage you to skip classes!) In future life you might never know if you are talking to somebody you really know, or a copy of that person. Cloning also raises many ethical questions;
- Should it be allowed to clone people?
- Do clones have feelings and emotions?
- Should clones be accepted as real human beings, with the same rights as we have?
- How many clones is each person allowed to have?
- What about immorality?
- What happens when the earth is getting overpopulated?
As shown above, there are still many questions to be solved before we could enter a life full of clones. But if we are capable of solving those questions, there might be a brilliant future ahead of us, not only in our daily life, but also in our healthcare system. We could use cloning to create embryo’s that we could use in stem cell therapy, this might solve the problems that we are having with organ transplants at this time.
Cloning, how far can we go? Could we create clones, each with a different mood?
Synthetic organs
Cloning embryos for organ transplants however has many ethical problems involved. A solution to this are Synthetic organs. Synthetic organs are organs created by bioprinting. In bioprinting, you use small cells that flow just like a liquid to form a small layer. On top of this layer you make another layer and one on top of that one etc. After just a couple of hours these layers start acting as, for example a complete hearth. They all start to beat synchronized, and they behave just like they would in a real heart. This new technology is perfect for organ transplants because there are almost no ethical problems coming along with it. At this time many thousands of people are waiting on a new kidney or a lung, because we don’t have enough people that want their organs to be used again. This has as a result that many people die, that could be saved by an relatively simple operation (not in all cases). Also, there is this big black market of organs at this time. People sell their kidneys for a lot of money, and other people can buy these “illegal” organs. These operations are often quite dangerous, because they are being done in bad, infectious circumstances. All these problems could be solved by Synthetic organs in future!