Medical Innovations and Quality of Life

I worked for the third largest medical company in the world St. Jude Medical. I worked on designing ASICs or ICs for cardiac pacemakers. I saw first hand how a device I helped to design help two people who had St. Jude pacemakers implanted in them. They worked at the company and were completely normal. Did you know that little babies and teenagers have to have pacemakers sometimes? You can not imagine how I felt knowing that I helped two employees and thousands of people all over the world. In addition I consulted with the senior engineer who worked on the drug pump for diabetics and also the ICD or implantable cardiodefibrillator.

True medical innovation will come when genetic engineering or nanotechnology measures that will eliminate the fundamental defect in insulin regulation in both Type I and Type II diabetes mellitus. Then the outlay of money and resources to improve the quality of life in diabetics will be a non-sequitor. A nice analogy was when the development of the iron lung for quality of life in polio patients, and the resultant fear as to its cost on health care was wiped out by the discovery and implementation of Jonas Salk's vaccine....now that is what we need, medical innovations that either cure or prevent disese and its affect on the individuals quality of life and at the same time reduces the cost of health care.....Treating the side-effects of DM type II such as infections, end-organ damage, might be beneficial for quality of life (marginally) but costs heavily on limited health care dollars, especially when DM type II is a life style issue stemming from the excesses in consumption and its resultant affect on the insulin regulatory system.