Tag Archives: medicine

Health and history

I had a dental cleaning today. I get one every 6 months. As I was sitting in the chair I thought about how far we’ve come in dental hygiene over the last few hundred years. I thought about how debilitating it would have been to need a root canal before root canals were a thing. Tooth aches can be an all consuming pain, and life before dentists could have been an agonizing experience.

So many inventions have saved lives: from penicillin to pacemakers, vaccines to vitamins, antibiotics to aspirin… science and medicine have been invented, created, and discovered to make our lives less painful and a lot safer.

We still have a ways to go with the likes of cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases yet to be beaten, but we’ll get there in my children’s lifetime, if not mine. Technology is getting better and the science of longevity is very promising. Soon our visits to the washroom will be more like doctor visits, with our urine and faeces being sampled and tested by our toilets, and an app on our phones will notify us if there are any health concerns to worry about.

It’s a marvel to think about how much has been done in the world of science and medicine to make our lives healthier and longer. It took a dental assistant getting plaque off of my not-flossed-regularly-enough teeth to help me appreciate the value of modern science. And, I’m happy to report that I’m cavity free!

New discoveries in old frontiers

I’m blown away by articles like this: Meet a rainbow fish and other new species discovered in 2022. How is it that in the year 2022, 146 new animal, plant and fungi species were discovered? Space is not the only undiscovered frontier, we still have so much more to learn about our own planet.

From the article: “The previously unknown creatures and plants were found around the world, including the mountains of California, Australia’s Queensland state, the rocky peaks of Brazil and the coral reefs of the Maldives. Scientists made discoveries on six continents and within three oceans.

Among the new species were 44 lizards, 30 ants, 14 flowering plants, 13 sea stars, seven fish, four sharks, three moths, two spiders and one toad.”

It’s amazing to think that we have so much more to learn about, both seeking and finding more living species, and also about some of the ways currently known species can be used in novel ways to improve our lives. Here is one example:

I think 2023 will be the year of the mushroom and we will see them used in unique medicinal, psychological, and health-enhancing ways. We’ll also see them abused and misused, and some people will mistake deadly ones for medicinal ones… but while these rare cases will foster some fear-mongering, most of the news will be about how mushrooms have amazing medicinal and even magical psychological properties that will help people with PTSD, depression, and even help people quite drinking and smoking.

What else will we learn? What new discoveries about our planet are in store for us in 2023? What new plants and animals will be found? What new cures are waiting to be discovered? Our forests and oceans might be old frontiers, but they are not frontiers that have been fully explored and exhausted of new discoveries.