Health care is always changing. If it wasn’t, then doctors would still be putting leeches on patients. As a medical student, understanding how medical treatment is changing on a regular basis is just as important as understanding how the human body work operates. Here are four ways that the medical world is changing.
Modern hospital rooms
Hospital rooms need to be clean and sterile in order for patients to be treated properly and recover as promptly as possible. Around the United States, hospitals are using innovative means to make their rooms as suitable for occupation as possible. This includes individual “care zones” for nursing, patient care and family care at the Methodist Richardson Medical Center in Richardson, Texas and the “energy efficient” Benjamin Russell Hospital for Children in Birmingham, Ala.
New Leukemia Treatment
Leukemia, cancer related to blood, can have devastating effects on a person’s body. However, there may be significant hope as of recently. The Food and Drug Administration looks poised to authorize a treatment in which patient with leukemia have cells removed, altered and re-administered it a way that fights the disease. Already, patients have been freed of leukemia and if the treatment is approved, plenty more could be.
3-D Printing
If you’ve paid any attention to technological news in the last few years, you’ve likely heard about how 3-D printing technology is developing at a rapid rate. Perhaps most astounding is that a missing limb or organ could be resolved with a few clicks. Organ printing, as well as printing prescription drugs, could soon become a reality that we take for granted. It might sound like something out of science fiction, but researchers are already making significant strides.
New ways of learning
Your medical education was likely greatly different that of your instructors, and their medical education was likely greatly different from that of their instructors. With the use of technology like augmented reality, which allows one to learn about the human body without so much as an actual cadaver, medical learning enters the digital realm seamlessly, and it looks to stay there.
As a young health care student, you might feel overwhelmed by all the changes that are happening in the medical field. You shouldn’t be. Instead, you should be excited by all the opportunities you’ll have to offer the best treatment possible for your patients and all the unrealized possibilities that await you. The world today is revolutionary, allowing students like yourself to obtain even complicated degrees like an MHA online. Becoming a part of the future is more accessible to you now than ever before. Don’t let the opportunities pass you by.