None of us are getting any younger. And time is taking its toll inevitably on all of us.
When I started this blog, I was a much younger mommy with a much younger outlook, and a much younger body. It’s a whole different ballgame for me now, and I’m sure many of you reading this, especially some of the more long-time readers, can say exactly the same thing.
The good news for all of us in the not-as-young-as-they-used-to-be crowd is that there has never been a better time to get old, and I mean that seriously! Technology is truly a wonderful thing sometimes, and medical technology in particular has made some pretty serious advances in recent years. Here are some examples:
Bunion Surgery
Bunion surgery cost and recovery time used to make it not worth doing in most cases. However, all of that has recently changed. Nowadays, they can correct a bunion and you are in and out on the same day, and recovery time has been reduced to days instead of the months required with traditional forms of bunion surgery.
Organ Transplants
We’ve been able to replicate skin cells for some time now, but things have gone a lot further forward in the past several years. Scientists in labs have been able to successfully fabricate blood vessels and even organs such as ovaries and a pancreas. Also, people are now walking around with titanium bones and jaws. The jaw is often a part of the human body that wears out faster than the others, so having a second chance at this is a pretty big deal!
Health Wearables
From your heart beat and blood pressure to your sleeping patterns and even your blood sugar, you are now able to track all of these things from a computer, a phone, or even a watch! This is a huge help for diagnosis and treatment, and also, very importantly, reduces greatly the possibility for any kind of medical error. Anybody who knows anybody with Type 1 diabetes knows how massive being able to track your blood sugar in real time is. Not only can it save your life in a bad situation, it can help you keep things level, reducing the need for more insulin and saving you money and adding years and quality to your life.
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is something that might even sound like a joke at first glance, but it’s actually extremely powerful as far as medicine is concerned.
One of its major applications is to be able to perform virtual surgeries using models of real patients’ anatomies, thus allowing for risk-free experimentation. Another is to run models to collect data, which allows for super-early detection of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
