What is preventive medicine?

What is the future of Western medicine?

• Western medicine refers to what westerners think of as mainstream medicine, that is: the use of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomedicine or medical biology to treat or heal patients. BTW, the term allopathic medicine is used by alternative medicine practitioners to refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pejorative to mainstream medicine.

• Answer:

  Some thoughts: Medicine is becoming increasingly data driven. The genomic revolution and next generation sequencing has enabled whole genome sequencing that is quickly approaching $1,000 per genome. The resulting explosion in demand for genome sequencing will demand data scientists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists to analyze and interpret the data (and also automation of such). There will be a shift in focus to preventative medicine in the molecular sense. Advances in stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and regenerative medicine will allow clinicians to mitigate a problem (usually genetic disorders) before they manifest. Surgery will become less and less invasive. With laproscopic procedures and innovations like the DaVinci surgical robot, major surgeries will be reduced to simpler procedures. An explosion in telemedicine through the internet. Services such as CrowdMed and HealthTap allow crowdsourced diagnoses and mobile health initiatives are further bridging the gap between the patient and clinic. The hope is that a loss of limb or organ will be a thing of the past. Advances in regenerative medicine (esp. Atala's group at Wake Forest) have shown incredible promise in growing articifical organs and body parts. They have succeeded in growing an artificial bladder and urethra and transplanting it into a patient. Human life expectancy will increase, not solely due to an improvement in quality of life, but through a molecular understanding of aging. Work being done by Cynthia Kenyon (UCSF), Liz Blackburn (UCSF), Francis Collins (NIH), and Carol Greider (Hopkins), just to name a few, will eventually lead to a mechanistic understanding of human aging and how to manipulate it. Designer babies and human cloning (I'm gonna ignore the ethics debate). At the pace current biomedical research is progressing, I won't be surprised if we see this by the end of the century.