I hope that no one expects to graduate as a physician in the next decade and retire in the same field. I only hope that the field is around long enough for you to pay off your school loans. If you are smart, I think you will have to look for a job developing wearable medical devices after practicing for a decade or two.
Humans are pretty healthy now compared with a thousand years ago, a century ago, or even fifty years ago. In general, if something ails us, we can go to a doctor who can tell us pretty much what it is. We prevent many ailments every day by taking showers, brushing our teeth, and washing our hands. In the future, we will be touching less and getting cleaned more. We will have devices that know our habits and can make healthy recommendations to go along with them. Those devices will know when we excrete and maybe what we have excreted and how much of what we've eaten our body has metabolized. If our devices don't know about a problem, we will be able to tell them about it and they will refer it to a doctor, and eventually make the medical diagnosis for themselves.
I'd trust a robot to know where to put a scalpel before I'd trust a human. So why do humans still operate? Because robots haven't been programmed to do the whole surgery and haven't been engineered to be as dexterous as a human hand stitching a wound. And the future will require less surgery and less stitches when surgery is required. And who controls the robots? Eventually no one. A doctor or technician may review the procedure afterwards to tell you that everything went 'ok', and eventually just to put a human face on a very traumatic process (why else would you be in surgery), and eventually you won't even see a human and just get a bill for a five minute heart transplant.
And you say you want another heart? Why wait for a donor to die so that you can get one organ that has already been used for 25 or 50 years or more when you can get one grown in minutes? And you like smoking, drinking, driving reckless - as long as your brain is intact, you'll be fine. In another century, why not just store a backup of your brain just in case?
Drugs - they only get better. What's the point of drugs: to alter your mental state or cure? Currently both. In time, they will get better, and then they will disappear. In fifty years, the need for drugs to cure medical ailments will be nonexistent. The only medical use for drugs in fifty years will be as prescribed by a psychologist - and even then, rarely. Recreational drugs will always be around. Lots of people enjoy drinking alcohol, this trend isn't going to die just because technology has improved. Furthermore, recreational drugs will improve - as more is learned about the brain and how certain chemicals effect certain parts of the brain, new drugs will be made to react with defined regions and cause real short - this allows for higher sails - and intense reactions of a desired effect.
After drugs are practically nonexistent, people may use controlled radiation or electricity to stimulate a certain part of the brain to cause the desired effect. This radiation or electricity may even come from your clothes (your wearable computer) as part of a computer program that you paid for.
I believe that this forum will help me with my writing in a couple of ways. Firstly, it will help me get the documents that I have prepared on this subject off of my computer which i think will help to better preserve them. Second, it will give me the incentive to make much needed spelling and grammar corrections to them. As I hope to present a bit more than 'fluff' - what an english teacher referred to writing that I think she would have preferred to call 'crap' - and something that people might enjoy reading versus being turned off by countless grammatical and spelling errors (as I often am when reading well thought but poorly written articles. Third, I would hope to get *thoughtful* feedback.
I think that my third incentive needs a bit definition when concerned with the loose term thoughtful. I don't expect Hubble, Dirak, Einstein, Newton, or Galileo to be reading my writing - as they're dead. Though, I doubt that Hawking, Tyson, or any other - still alive - great minds to read my work. What I would expect is that if you wish to give me feedback, you abide by a couple of 'rules', so please:
Last, the pictures on the slide show may or may not have been taken by me. Most were taken on family vacations and since we only had one (fairly) high end camera - the talented photographers that we all are - had to share. So I can't say which of these pictures I took and which I didn't (unless I was in it - and that is rare).
I think that my third incentive needs a bit definition when concerned with the loose term thoughtful. I don't expect Hubble, Dirak, Einstein, Newton, or Galileo to be reading my writing - as they're dead. Though, I doubt that Hawking, Tyson, or any other - still alive - great minds to read my work. What I would expect is that if you wish to give me feedback, you abide by a couple of 'rules', so please:
- Say more than five words - "You're an idiot" "Love your writing" - I DON'T CARE
- Unless you are pointing a unbiased and blunt untruth I have stated, take more than five minutes to think about what you are saying.
- Make your point and be done with it - don't keep reiterating a point you've already made, don't put incessant carriage returns (aka - 'enter') like a teenage chat room.
- Don't type everything big and bold, small and blending in with the background, or using all caps.
Last, the pictures on the slide show may or may not have been taken by me. Most were taken on family vacations and since we only had one (fairly) high end camera - the talented photographers that we all are - had to share. So I can't say which of these pictures I took and which I didn't (unless I was in it - and that is rare).