3 Review(s)

What will medicine be like a decade from now? Already laparoscopic surgery is making under the knife scars look quaint and old fashioned. A doctor in New York can remove a gall bladder in a patient in London via computer. Experts agree that we are entering the Golden Age of Medicine, and our everyday experience of being ill and getting better may seem more like science fiction than an average trip to the doctor. Bill Hanson, chief of the trauma unit at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and an inventor of medical technology, offers true-life and intensely intimate stories about the way biotechnology is changing people's lives. * An electronic nose that detects infection, such as pneumonia, based on a person's breath * Robots with appendages that can feel their way around tissue, which will replace surgeons in operating room * Computer health wizards that will prescribe you medicine through your home computer * Computerized psychotherapists dispensing advice about emotional problems * Telehealth software that serves as a monitoring nurse for difficult to manage chronic illnesses such as diabetes.* Wheelchairs operated by reading electrical brainwaves for patients with severe neurological deterioration. William Hanson describes the human genius that arrived at these amazing discoveries, and how innovators are working to take these feats to an even more technologically advanced level. And more importantly, he discusses what the human experience will be and how we can prepare ourselves for the moral and ethical challenges that these awesome changes will bring. This riveting and startling account will make us revise our expectations of our own mortality.