Medical Technology

This morning my wife went through a knee surgery. This is a corrective procedure so that the knee joint replacement (as suggested by most doctors we consulted) was not necessary for some more time. But this post is not about that, though the knee joint prosthesis certainly rates as one of the wonders! There were couple of pictures about surgery in olden days hanging at the entrance to the OT complex.

One was of a woman who was totally conscious and yet a surgeon had started the removal procedure of one of her breasts. There was one assistant holding her hands and patients had to endure such a process. The other was that of a man hanging from some contraption, one person hanging on to one shoulder and the other was straining at the other shoulder trying to correct a dislocated shoulder! I was struck by how far we have come! I am sure many must have died simply from the shock/trauma of the surgery itself!

But today knee replacement is possible and works well for at least twenty years! I am not even looking at heart/liver/kidney transplant like really sophisticated procedures. The surgery itself is not that much of a trauma anymore. There are a whole host of things to manage the post surgical pain and recovery. After you have recovered, it feels so good! Most often at least! With this corrective procedure my wife should be able to start walking reasonably comfortably again and that should last 5 to 10 years! I remember with my own surgery, the ankle fracture was completely healed. Three years later when the hardware were removed, there was not one spot on the pieces of metal that remained inside my body for three years!

But all this happened step by step, one baby step at a time! These advances on so many areas have brought us this overall advancement! I kept wondering how many experiments, how many researchers toiling away at it and technological advances made all these advances possible!

You cannot help wondering how small improvements at the boundary areas of any discipline keeps moving the boundary in small increments! Yet over a time you have a larger area representing the body of knowledge!