Introduction

-Web Poll -

Modern medicine is powerful and effective, and is likely to become more so. Its scientific and technological approach to ill health has yielded unrivalled benefits. Illnesses once unpreventible, symptoms once unmanageable, and conditions once incurable have now been conquered by the application of a better knowledge of the structure of the human body and the way it works.

Unfortunately this hymn of praise is not the complete picture, Medicine is increasingly troubled by negative developments and doubts. Ivan Illich once declared that "The medical establishments has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of epidemic."

In the 21st century medical revolution, genetic engineering and the use of computers will dominate the developments in the field of medicine. In this entry, we will try to look into these possibilities with a greater detail.

[The Promise of Medicine]		The more that is understood of the causes of illness, the greater the potential for prevention. Preventive knowledge is effective only if acted on, and there is still little grasp of what makes people act as they do and how they can be persuaded to do otherwise. Any form of prevention that depends on behavioral change will, most likely, continue to be overshadowed in science and technology that are now shaping the future of medicine.
[Robosurgery]		The prospect of lying unconscious while an electromechanical device cuts and probes is disconcerting. However, if computer-controlled machinery can mimic the awareness, adaptability and knowledge of a human surgeon, such a takeover in the operating theatre is actually realistic.
[Designer Drugs]		The search for new drugs has traditionally relied on trial and error. Although this method has yielded large numbers of useful drugs, it is wasteful. Much better would be to design drugs for specific purposes. And this has now become a reality.
[Monoclonal Antibodies]		By making monoclonal antibodies specific to fetal cells,it should be possible to detect abnormalities of the fetus. A small number of fetal cells cross the lacenta and enter the mother's bloodstream but we don't need to worry about catching the one in 5 million fetal cell in the bloodstream.
[The Genetic Diseases]		Over the last few decades, much effort has been put to characterize the environmental causes behind many common diseases but few attempts have been made to identify their genetic basis. Recently the technology for identifying such genes has become available.
[The flight of science in medicine]		Kidney disease was once considered as the consequence of evil spirits, wicked deeds, a malicious deity or some other such influence, it is now viewed as a material problem : the failure in the biological body that should be filtering, cleaning and adjusting the body fluids.
[Fears of the rich and poor]		In the 20th century, people in developing countries have witnessed the dramatic impact of scientific principles on high infant mortality and endemic infections. In due course, patterns of mortality in developing countries will begin to resemble those of the industrial nations, with cancer and cardiovascular disease displacing infections as the main causes of illness and death.