The Changing Profession of Medicine (1981-2002, Section 9)
While physicians have expressed frustrations over managed care, they also have witnessed tremendous advancements in medicine, capping a century of improvements in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. While this section discusses changes in surgery and drug therapy, these are but two of many advances that have reshaped the practice of medicine in that last quarter century.
New forms of surgery, for example, allows physicians in various fields, such as obstetrics and gynecology, gastroenterology, orthopedics, to perform minimally invasive procedure that reduce the trauma of and recovery time from surgery. Doctors assess interior surfaces of an organ or joint by inserting a rigid or flexible tube with a video camera into the body. In many cases, physicians only need to make one other small incision for surgical instruments.
There also have been major developments in pharmacology, the study of how drugs interact with living organisms to change function. Many medical conditions that proved fatal in the past, such as high blood pressure, can be controlled, if not cured by medicine. Drug companies, however, have been subject to criticisms because their marketing representatives supposedly influence doctors and other health professionals through gifts or biased information and because the companies promote public awareness of relatively minor conditions simply to create markets for medications. Nonetheless, drug therapies have changed medical treatments of a variety of conditions from hypertension to cancer.
The enormous strides in medicine in the twentieth century did not and could not eliminate disease. Despite improvements in surgery and drugs, for example, heart disease and cancer, which are attributable, in part, to environmental and genetic conditions, remain the two top killers in the United States.
While western medicine seemed to gain control over certain infectious and contagious diseases, the worldwide AIDS crisis of the past 25 years reminds us of nature’s resiliency. Other diseases, such as measles, tuberculosis, or pertussis (informally known as Whooping Cough, were long considered conquered, but recently have shown resurgences.