Big Future Prospects For Health and Medicine

In the past few decades the advancement in technology have been vast, this has allowed for numerous discoveries and improvements in healthcare. Some of the prospects for the future of health and medicine are truly astounding and if they come about they will revolutionise the area of medicine and health. So what are these future prospects.

1) Treating infertility

I decided to start with this because it has been shown all over the news in the recent week. The university of Newcastle in England have created sperm artificially using male cells. This means that we could in the future treat infertility in men and help thousands if not millions of couple's to conceive.

2) Cloning

Cloning has always got a bad rap from the press and yes there are numerous ethical issues surrounding it, but let's have a look at the advantages of therapeutic cloning. This form of cloning can be used to help create cells that can be used in medicine for example in tissue engineering or for use in transplantation.

3) Stem cells research

Another one to hit the papers frequently. This links in with therapeutic cloning in terms of uses. However the distinction here is that you use stem cell lines. Stem cells have the capability to transform into any cell type and this is advantageous because it can be used for many purposes such as creating bone marrow or blood cells. This will eliminate the laborious task of finding a donor for chronically ill individuals.

4) Genetic engineering

We are who we are because of our genes, so being able to modify your genes would have profound effects on who you are. This can become beneficial especially for individuals who suffer from conditions which are the result of defective genes. These conditions include muscular dystrophies, haemophilia, cystic fibrosis, list goes on. With the human genome now fully sequenced it is only a matter of time before we can effectively modify our genes to treat illnesses in the future.

Now don't get too optimistic these are all definite possibilities for the future but we are not sure if they will become reality however we can assume that with the continual improvements in technology and medical research it is possible that these future prospects will become a reality.