Future medical technologies are a wild card in the context of healthcare policy and strategic planning only to the extent they are not understood and their likely impacts not seriously studied. Technology’s impact on drug discovery, at least, is now better understood, and the industry is taking some of the steps needed to reverse the […]

Accelerating technological advances suggest a need for reconsideration of projected long-term medical staffing shortages. Projections of a shortage of funds for drug development could also benefit from revision in the light of the emergence of more powerful, less costly drug development technologies. But shortages of funds for hospitals are real, forcing some to resort to […]

We are sceptical that more spending on diet and exercise programs will put much of a dent in the growing obesity-related diabetes epidemic in the US. People prefer pills to pushups, and until a pill is developed, many choose risky and expensive bariatric surgery over safe and inexpensive diet and exercise. In other words, people […]

The acceleration of innovations appears to be taking its toll on ethics, which can’t keep up; and in the United States the PATRIOT Act could be taking a toll on the acceleration of innovations, which is being denied the contributions of foreign scientists. Surgical procedures are being broadcast live over the Internetto beef up hospital […]

The accelerating introduction of new surgical technologies creates a need forsuitably equipped training facilities, of which there are currently very few. Doctors need to keep up with not just medical technologies, however, but information technologies (IT) also, or risk patients’ taking medical matters into their own hands. IT is too much of both threat and […]

The pharmaceutical industry is always in the news, for astonishing new drugs, breath-taking profits, unsettling business practices, and all points in between. Recently, a TV health channel that carries their advertising messages to the patient’s bedside has been challenged, their high charges for orphan drugs are being resisted, and their sophisticated use of information technologies […]