Chris Phoenix on Future Medicine
Some thoughts on trends in medicine, conceptual and practical, from Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology: "Medicine today is essentially a fight to maintain a reasonably healthy status quo. Stasis is a good thing; any change from health is disease, which is to be combated. This is a very Guardian worldview. ... Is there a connection between the Guardian approach to disease, and the Guardian approach to the business side of medicine? I strongly suspect that there is. ... What would happen if science developed the ability to make people healthier than healthy? What if medicine could change from fighting disease to actually improving the lives of healthy people? ... Perhaps doctors will continue to focus on fighting disease. Unfortunately, they may also fight the advances that researchers outside the medical system will make with increasing frequency."