BIO BLOG.

Technologic @ Friday, May 27, 2011

In the past, innovators have worked hard to fight pain and suffering, combat disease and for a long time to create new medical technologies. The technology that we now have became ordinary to us. I would be pretty weird not seeing a doctor without a stethoscope because the world we live in today is in such influence with various technologies. Today, we can find sphygmomanometers in every drug store. We sometimes can always take technologies for granted, such as x-rays and microscope because we encounter them constantly. These technologies are important in understanding a variety of internal body system. Without it, the health professionals wouldn’t be able to do their job, essential for the health of all patients.

Before the 19th century, doctors would use manual techniques to diagnose their patients. The invention of the Hutchinson’s device or the spirometer kicked the new wave of health care into gear. The spirometer was used to measure the amount of air passing through the lungs. It all seemed so simple but it can provide a lot of information of a patient’s condition and help diagnose respiratory diseases. After this, physicals had spent time on improving technologies, so they wouldn’t perform surgery. This was the time were thermometer, stethoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, and x-ray were created. With these creations, doctors were able to see and hear internal body parts such as the lungs and heart. Since the early 20th century, new medical technologies had been coming out, changing health care forever.
A recent technological innovation in health care is the Cardiac Catheterization, a method of diagnosing coronary distress. Claude Bernard, in 1844 injected a needle using a thermometer into the heart of a horse to measure its temperature. For the next forty years he used similar techniques to find the horse’s blood and soon, people followed in Bernard’s footsteps to. In modern procedures, a small thin tube (catheter) is passed into a leg vein as a dye travels through the catheter and to the heart, shown by an x-ray. The dye reveals areas of blockage in the heart. A doctor who is using this procedure can get a better understanding of the patient’s problem.

Heart conditions can be diagnosed by an electrocardiographs (ECG), used to map electrical fields throughout the heart. ECGs are very common are commonly seen in television or in movies. Without ECG, a doctor would have difficulty to accurately calculating someone’s heartbeat. Canadian doctors have research the heart to try to create an artificial heart. Tofy Mussivand, an Ottawa doctor has been looking over different process of creating an artificial hearts for patients with heart disease. His dream can give a good idea of how much technology has changed.

Even though people have been criticising technology in the health care industry as they are the reason for rising medical cost, there no doubt that it has helped us more then expected. Technology no only has helped us understand the human anatomy, but also it had added more years to live for the entire population.

Reference
http://blog.ictforhealth.com/2009/10/evolution-of-medical-technology/
http://www.ehow.com/about_4672066_medical-technology.html
http://healthandkarma.blogspot.com/2010/12/evolution-of-medical-technology-glimpse.html
http://timerime.com/en/timeline/300535/Evolution+of+Medical+Technology/
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003337.htmhttp://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/cath/cath_what.html

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