The efforts that technology has put in place to improve our health conditions and our life expectancy seem to prepare for the great leap, causing a substantial transformation in the way we treat ourselves and stay healthy for a long time. Here are the changes we should prepare for, and if they do not arrive quickly we should press for them to happen:
- Loanable Telemedicine: Telemedicine services, lighter consultations that can be delivered via telephone or internet now have an excellent propensity for monitoring. It is possible to keep an eye on professionals and their volume of consultations, and in the same way save a lot of budget money for Health to be allocated to infrastructures, with management costs much lower than those necessary to support a total study activity. . From a common sense estimate made by evaluating the proportions of red, yellow and green emergency room codes, 70% of consultations 'in the flesh' could easily take place at a distance.
- Prevention medicine: The increasing knowledge of the critical factors capable of generating the onset of pathologies will give more and more space to the 'preventive' branch of Medicine. Even if it seems bad to say, in the future we will probably take more drugs and active ingredients when 'healthy' than after being sick, with further savings for the health coffers. Why spend a lot of money if with half the investment I can completely avoid a disease?
Even one of these changes would suffice to produce a chain reaction with significant results, which would also produce enormous increases in some of the most promising trends in medicine, areas that are already in strong development and capable of significantly improving the quality of our life without 'disturbing' nanotechnologies:
- Biological sensors, systems capable of monitoring our health conditions (electronic patches that let us know in real time the amount of glucose in the blood). Other major developments are expected in the field of sensors capable of 'following us' everywhere and throughout the day, providing doctors with our encephalogram and useful information to assist us;
- Tracking systems, which already invade (in very embryonic form) our market: think of all the systems able to 'track' our sleep (to see if we snore or breathe well) or the dozens of electronic gadgets able to act as a 'trainer 'in our daily jogging sessions, recording our performances and broadcasting them on the net, creating a' group 'of like-minded people who exchange advice and help each other to achieve a common goal.
- Mobile app, real self-diagnostic tests increasingly developed to increase awareness of our body and attention to symptoms that a few years ago would have been ignored.
Will the future be a doctor who can fit in a pocket if necessary? It seems so.
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