Healthcare is now more important than ever before. As we live longer and longer, we require different standards of care than people did centuries or even decades ago. For example, two hundred years ago, a lot of illnesses that are no big deal today were deadly. People had to learn how to cope with a world of physical and mental uncertainty much more than they have to do today. If there were any doctors, they were local doctors who operated their own medical clinic wherever they could. There were no physical therapy places or doctors ratings where people could go to get the care that they need. To the extent that there was any system in place, it was mostly just individual people practicing individual medicine, many untrained and most highly experimental and, therefore, highly dangerous in terms of medical practitioners. But, of course, it is no longer that way, not with the advent of modern medicine and other contemporary and industrial advancements. But how did we get here? And, perhaps more importantly, where are we going next? What exactly are these advancements we have made in medicine and how have they made a difference?
The History of Medicine
Medicine is one of the world’s oldest professions and for good reasons. People have needed to rest and to heal ever since there were people at all. In the beginning, most of this was shamanic practice, people using what they knew of nature and animals to try and drive out bad spirits. This wasn’t the cause of illnesses, obviously, but there was no way to know that back in and people did the best they could with what they had. There was no walk in health clinic or easily accessible hospital for people to visit if they were injured. If a person did get sick or injured, it was up to their tribe to take care of them and make sure that they get better. This, you might imagine, was a somewhat difficult practice and left untold numbers of people in peril who might have otherwise been alright. Over the centuries, as society become more or less complex depending on the era, medicine mostly stayed the same with only minor alterations. Though there were a few brave souls who ventured forth to discover what it was that caused sickness or looked under primitive microscopes, for most of the population medicine boiled down to supernatural cures for strange illnesses that they could neither see nor predict. It was, above all else, a scary time.
Medicine in the Modern Sense
Medicine has come a long way since then. Actually, it has simultaneously come a long way and has really been on a short journey, comparatively speaking. Modern medicine as we know it, the walk in health clinic and all, has only been around for about a century and a half, with the advent of the industrial revolution and all. The spread of advanced machinery and powered machines revolutionized all areas of life, from transportation to food to, of course, medicine. As our tools for viewing the world got more specific, our understanding of what causes disease increased dramatically. In our modern walk in health clinic world, a lot has changed! Even small things that many Americans suffer from, ankle sprains, in older Americans maybe dizziness, can be taken care of easily and efficiently. The walk in health clinic is even a good place for minor operations such as fracture care or sprain care. This is a far cry from the old days when most people suffered in silence, their help being limited to the resources available to their tribe or village. We have access to a lot more resources in our modern world and walk in clinics do a good job of utilizing those resources in a way that helps the most people. But where does this all lead in the future? Where will the future of medicine take us in the next fifty or one hundred or two hundred years? That is a difficult, almost impossible, question to answer. But progress is progress and hopefully we can alleviate more needless suffering in more people as time marches on.