The Future

In the ideal doctor's office there would be a desk neatly stacked with a prescription pad, two pens, a notebook, small laptop and a cordless connection to a projector that faces a white board. The patient walks in with their lab results and with the stroke of some keys the relevant variables pop up, history and all, as a beautiful excel graph. Each dot representing the patients history, letting the doctor see trends, letting the patients see work. With each question, another graph can pop up: this is HHV-6 level two years ago, this is your CD3/CD4 ratio twenty years ago. We prepare for our biochemistry presentations more than we do for our patients.

The future also has drugs, drugs and drugs. But not just drugs, pictures of drugs flying on that white board. With those same keystrokes, the doctor sees all the current medication that the patient is on and with another stroke the counter indications come up. Perhaps, in my ideal world, the structure floats through the blood brain barrier and binds to a pretty receptor on a membrane, and all of a sudden a cyclic AMP floats off and hits a DNA strand. How fascinating the mechanism of action is, what if we played some two drugs together, would they ever bump.

The best students are those who want to cure or those who want to be cured. Their life is worth an education. The medication will relieve the symptoms but the knowledge will cure the ailment. Oh the future does look so bright.

A joke at every end:

What did the DNA strand ask the other DNA strand?
"Do these genes make my butt look fat"