John Kang Liquidmetal supporter and an absolute great within the medical field is an inspiration of mine and part of the reason why I wanted to study medicine in the first place. There are few surgical oncologists quite like Dr. Kang and even fewer with the highly ethical code of conduct nor the results that this man has achieved in his career. I was fortunate enough to meet John Kang at a medical conference at the end of last year where we were able to get our teeth stuck into a conversation about tech in medicine. I couldn’t believe that I was meeting him of course, John Kang WebMD contributor, industry giant and the inspiration sat right there in front of me. I calmed my nerves and here is what he had to say about tech in medicine.

Diagnosis

For too many years we have laid a large focus on treatments of diseases and we have used technology in a great many ways to alleviate and cure a wide range of ailments and disease. Thanks to this we have developed better chemotherapy, more effective tumor removal and of course the use of lasers which can now treat a huge range of problems. The issue however is that we have been focusing too heavily on this area when in fact we should’ve been working harder on diagnosis-related tech. This is not to say that we haven’t been spending time and money on this, but the split should be weighted more towards diagnosis than treatment, as the former negates the need for the latter.

Solutions

Better tech doesn’t just allow us to give better direct treatment to patients and investment in better tech can actually help to solve secondary issues which result in poorer care. Take for example waiting times, something which restricts patients from being seen quicker. The cause of this is ultimately that there are too many people going to hospital for health complaints which don’t require hospital attention. Tech here can step up and we can use virtual doctors to help these patients before they leave home, thus relieving the stress on the ER and the hospital in general. Further investment into better tech solutions like this can aid us in fixing a huge range of problems when it comes to the logistics of a hospital.

Easier Solutions

The greatest risk that we will run in the world of medicine is when we think that an adequate treatment is acceptable simply because it cures. Take chemotherapy for example, it works very well in treating cancer but it is essentially toxic and can damage many other parts of the body. Through further investment of time and energy into tech we will be able to not only cure problems, but do so in a way that is final and which doesn’t have secondary or tertiary effects on the patients.

Tech is very much the future.