Thankful Thanksgiving Day 16: Medical Advances

Today I am thankful for modern medicine. I like knowing that the odds of my wife dying in labor or my son dying young are very low. I like that things that decimated populations before are now no longer a threat.

It’s cool to think that there is a real chance that some of the currently deadly or debilitating diseases will be treatable during my lifetime. All those diseases I fear getting, could be cured before I have to worry about them. And that’s on top of all of the deadly diseases I no longer have to worry about.

Things aren’t perfect, but it’s better now than it was for the majority of human civilization. Of course, that contributes to the crazy rapid growth in population we’ve seen over the last 150 years, but everything has consequences.

I look forward to the day we have a Star Trek like device that you can just wave over a cut and heal it. It will happen some day. And all of the work being done with robotics and brain activity might bring about real Star Wars level cybernetic limbs. And that’s if genetics and cloning doesn’t catch up and master the art of cloning replacement body parts.