Medicine, Always New and Improving

Medicine has always been an extremely contentious and controversial issue that is continuing to expand and develop through different experiments and techniques. By definition, medicine is the science and art dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease, from Merriam-Webster. Medicine has always been a questionable topic from the Scientific Revolution to today’s medical controversies; science and medicine are simply always controversial. Medicine is always changing and has the opportunity and privilege to change the life of any individual that is in desperate need of assistance. There is always a need for the newest, most advanced, and quite frankly, the best medical equipment out there. In order to obtain these medical standards that we all have, money is defiantly required.

A current article published in the New York Times entitled “Is Newer Better, Not Always”, has some point that I feel need to be addressed. I do agree that advances in medicine are extremely expensive, however I believe that medicine is always advancing and continuing improve in every aspect. These improvements can be seen on not only a wide scale, but on a molecular scale as well. Medicine is continuing to become safer, more technologically advanced, as well as has less side effects to deal with. From the times of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to current times, where people are searching for cures of cancer and dealing with medical topics such as cloning and abortion, it is definitely proven that the money spent on medical research has been effective.

I believe that medicine is a topic that must be looked at over a long range of time. There is no denying the fact that medicine has became extremely advanced and the only way that it will continue to grow is obviously with more money to help support the scientists and doctors who make it all possible. Simply tax payers must understand that their money is going to help them in the long run, so when the medical professionals formulate cures for these diseases that we see as incurable today, you will understand why some tax money quite simply must go to the medical field.

One point of the article that stuck me was, “No one wants to bar patients from getting the treatment they need. But without curtailing the use of unnecessary, overly costly and even dangerous new technologies and surgical procedures, there is little hope of restraining the relentless rise in health care costs”. Part of this statement I agree with in which nobody wants to ignore helpless patients from the help they desperately need, but the fact that he states that dangerous new technologies and surgical procedures are used to cure this, I feel is completely inaccurate. Medical procedures have became much more accountable and dependable to cure a patient from their pain. Look back in time, back to when individuals could have a broken arm and doctors then could have had to amputate the arm, but in today’s era is a simple fix.

I believe as though science and medicine are both growing tremendously and the only way for this major field of study is to continue to grow is by getting the money needed for expansion.