Modern Medicine

Medicine saves and improves the lives of billions of people all over the world. There are many scientific discoveries and inventions that have changed the practice of medicine.

One important discovery was Anaesthetics. Many years ago, if you needed surgery you would have to put up with extreme pain. For example, Amputations are when a body parts such as a leg, arm, or finger has to be cut off. When amputations were performed in the 1800s, the patients were given a piece of wood to bite on to stop them screaming from the pain! Since then, various chemicals have been discovered that can deaden or numb the nerves and pain. Today they are used in nearly all surgery, from removal of teeth to heart surgery.

Before the 1900s doctors depended on being able to feel injuries such as broken bones. The x-ray, invented in 1895,allows the doctors to see through flesh to bone structure below. Today x-rays, scans and other technology are common ways of looking at what is happening Inside the body.

Vaccination or immunization is another discovery that has saved millions of people from diseases such as measles and smallpox. Smallpox was once a fatal disease - killing over 30 millions people by the end of the 1900s. But it has almost completely disappeared because children received the smallpox vaccines.

Medical researchers are still working on cures for many other diseases. These includes HIV, which has killed millions of people since the 1980s. There are new treatments now for malaria, and scientists continue to work on better treatments. Asthma is a condition that makes breathing difficult. Alzheimer's disease affects elderly people, causing memory loss and other mental problems. Ebola is another disease for which there is no cure, although people can recover with the correct treatment. Even the common cold still has no cure.

Thanks to medicine, diseases that used to kill millions have been stopped. Health problems that used to be serious are now not life-threatening. And in the future there will be cures for many other diseases.

Health is Wealth....