With that in mind, even more changes will be coming to the planet in the near future. Even within the next 10 years, those changes are going to become more obvious and the health of people who are ingesting these chemicals and modified foods will likely begin to decline. When that gets coupled with the obesity epidemic, there will be a generation that will not live as long as their parents did (Simmons, 2009). This will be the first time that has happened, and obviously is not the way the U.S. population wants to go with longevity numbers and health issues. It is possible to make changes to avoid these kinds of problems, but so far nothing is being done to make those changes and soon it will be past the time to do anything differently.
Technology is highly important in health care, and will continue to play a role in the care of patients well into the future (Tulenko et al., 2009). There are a large number of different ways in which technology can play a part, so each and every aspect of health care could be affected. The majority of technological advances in health care are involved with diagnosing diseases and other health problems. As these diagnostic devices advance and continue to develop, more money will be spent on them and more people will be diagnosed with disease more easily and at earlier stages (Tulenko et al., 2009). That is very...
However, technology can also cause health scares in the sense of false positives due to oversensitive equipment and can result in unnecessary testing and worry for patients. The extra expense of this additional testing can also be a serious factor for patients.
While technology has improved many lives, there are ways in which the technology is causing difficulty, and most of those ways are financial. Patients and insurance companies are paying for tests that are not necessary. Doctors are struggling to have the latest equipment and keep up with other doctors and medical facilities - and they often have to charge patients more money to pay for the new equipment. It becomes a vicious cycle and there is no end to it in sight at the moment. With that in mind, technology is both a benefit and a distraction to the real issues that are being faced by patients and doctors in the health care field today. While it may diagnose problems earlier and save lives in some cases, it can also cause more issues than it is worth in other cases. Only time will tell how much technology will change and how much it will benefit the
health care system in the U.S. In the future. With the added expenses of
baby boomers and people who have no insurance, the U.S. health care system is currently struggling and it does not look as though that will change.
References
Bond J. & Bond S. (1994). Sociology and Health Care. NY: Churchill Livingstone.
Simmons J. (2009).
Primary Care Needs New Innovations to Meet Growing Demands. HealthLeaders Media.
Tulenko et al., (2009). Framework and measurement issues for monitoring entry into the health workforce. Handbook on monitoring and
evaluation of
human resources for health. Geneva, World Health Organization.
