advantage of technology on the health

The essentiality of improving healthcare is limitless. As such, scientists are continuously striving to employ the use of technologies to enhance the quality of human’s health. Technologies has affected multiple aspects of the healthcare industry. Not only that it was used to create new medicines, ways of diagnosing, and treating diseases; but it has also drastically improved the efficiency of those processes. The aim of this essay is to further elaborate the advantages of technologies on the wellbeing of humans’ health.
Firstly, technologies have allowed pharmacists to come up with new medicines. According to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), there were 22 new approved medicines in 2016, and 20 as of May 2017. All of these medicines were invented in laboratories, with the assistance of drug development technologies such as Biological Safety Cabinets, Centrifuges, or Laminar Airflow Workstations. These technologies have assisted scientists to compose, test, and store pharmaceutical products. Furthermore, even generic mass production technologies like assembly lines and desiccants has also improved the production and storage of medicines. Ultimately, drug development technologies are the cornerstone of the healthcare industry, as it allows scientists to continuously improve and discover medicines.
Next, technologies also assist doctors with diagnosing and treating patients. In the pasts, doctors only diagnostic tool is to observe the patients’ symptoms, or by simply measuring their pulse. They had no methods to access to what is actually going on within the patient’s body. However, modern technologies such as X-ray scanners, endoscopy, and ultrasound has enables doctors to access in-depth information on the patients’ health statuses. They can now see what was impossible to see in the past. Furthermore, wearable technologies such as smartwatches and smartphones can monitor the person’s conditions based on his/her daily routine, body temperature, and heartrate. The advantage of wearable technologies is that they can monitor a person over a longer period of time, thus giving a wider scope of information of that person to the doctors. In addition, the information that they provide is also instantaneous, and can be accessed from a distance. This allow doctors to monitor their patients without having to have the patients being kept at the hospital. These monitoring tools also help doctors to reduce their error rate. Without the necessary information provided from technologies, doctors would have to make many assumptions on the patients’ statuses, and thus has a higher chance of making the wrong assumption, leading to wrong diagnosis, and wrong treatment in the end.
Technologies for treatment of disease has also improved. There was a time when disease such as chicken pox, small pox, malaria, or rabies were considered fatal. The Black Death for instance, has killed 60% of Europe’s population. But with the help of modern medicines and vaccines, the threat of those diseases has become insignificant. Surgical equipment like ECG machines, heart rate monitors, and even surgical robots has improved the precision of surgeons in this high-pressure procedure. Treatments for fatal diseases such as HIV and cancer has also been assisted with technologies like cell targeted medicine treatment, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy; which has drastically risen the survival chance of patients.
In addition, not only that technologies are used to treat disease, it has also allowed human to improve their overall health, both physically and mentally. Life expectancy has improved from 50-60 years to 70-80 years. The physical wellbeing of human is a result of better healthcare, which is impacted greatly be technologies. In short, technologies have increased human’s lifespan. However, longer lifespan is not only attributed to the physical health of human, but also their emotional wellbeing. In other words, people who are happy are healthier. In this perspective, technologies that are not related to the medical field can also be said to have a positive impact on human’s health. Entertainment media like television, computers, and smartphones keep people entertain and relax after their stressful working hours; or plastic surgery and dentistry makes people feel good about their appearance. These are all the emotional benefits that technologies can bring, and thus also contributes to a better live for humans.
Aside from the above benefits that technologies brought to the healthcare industry; perhaps the most important role of technologies is to convey information. In a medical perspective, technologies have allowed doctors to extract information from the patients that were previously impossible to access (diagnostic technologies). But the overall impact of information conveying is much bigger. Communication and collaboration between medical practitioners were made possible with technologies. It allows scientists to share them researches, to test each other’s’ works, and to continuously built upon each other. It also allows medical facilities, such as hospitals to improve their working efficiencies with IT systems, which’s purpose is also to store and process information.
To summarize, technologies has assisted the health care industry by assisting scientists in creating new medicines, improving the production and storage of those medicines, helped doctors in monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients, improving the emotional wellbeing of human, as well as allowing information to be extracted and processed for healthcare providers. With these technologies, humans are able to treat diseases that were previously fatal, as well as to continuously improve and find out new ways to enhances life quality. However, while technologies come with great benefits, it must also be noted that many health-related problems that human have are the result of technological developments. Air and water pollutions for instance, are the result of many technologies that are used daily. So, in a sense, technologies are continuously striving to solves problems of previous technologies. But with the advancement of science and the overall understanding of human’s health, technologies in the future will be developed with care, so that their adverse effects would be insignificant compared to their benefits. A future where every disease is curable is entirely possible.