Comments on: Medical Advance of the Decade?

By: oncRN

oncRN — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:18:26 +0000

glad it was limited to medical advances and i wasn’t forced to decide between Gleevec and The Swiffer.

By: robin andrea

robin andrea — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:13:20 +0000

I cast my vote, dr. charles. I don’t mind telling you that I voted for the wealth of medical information online. Last year, my mother was suffering a debilitating case of something her doctors called “lupus-like syndrome.” She was prescribed dose after dose of Prednisone, but her condition only worsened. She was hospitalized twice. I did a little online research. I think the search string I used was “pain medication pleuritic conditions” (or something like that). I was looking for something other than Prednisone to help her. I found a site that had a list of medications that actually cause lupus-like symptoms. One was a very rare side effect of simvastatin, something my mother had been taking for about 18 months. When she stopped the medication, all of her symptoms completely disappeared (and never returned). It was incredible. Took a few weeks to wean off the Prednisone, and she was pretty much back to herself. I can’t tell you how much that online info means to me and my family.

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:14:21 +0000

DrC, nitric oxide was suitable as a research advance of the 1990’s, but its promise as a medical advance has not yet occurred. It will.

To me, a “medical advance” has to mean actual treatments for actual patients that actually improve patients lives. The human genome is a terrific research tool and research advancement, but it has not yet had much of an impact on actual treatments.

Guinea Worm has to be pretty high up there.

It hasn’t quite happened yet, but Obama’s Health Care Bill might still squeak in.

By: Micha

Micha — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:13:16 +0000

I’ll also argue for HPV vaccine with the caveat that it has more promise than proven benefit at this time and needs global distribution to communities with the highest disease burden. However, I also give a strong vote to battlefield medicine: like Gleevac, it is also an advance spanning decades. Strangely enough though, those advances are less “surgical” than Gleevac as they are the result of slowly chipping at a problem. I think many people fail to realize that older advances (infusion, transfusion, debridement, etc) in battlefield medicine are now common place in hospital. More recently “damage control” procedures from US experience in Iraq have saved obstetric and non-GSW trauma patients. I know a young healthy woman who didn’t really know she had a risk of dying in pregnancy and is still alive today because of trauma techniques extrapolated from war.

By: drcharles

drcharles — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:36:42 +0000

Great additions. I will amend this post and open the polling booths shortly!

By: rezmed

rezmed — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:53:16 +0000

Smoking bans and consequent fall in community cardiovascular disease.

Not very sexy, but very important for two reasons. It shows that government policy can change peoples’ behaviors and improve their health. This will be very important as the world now faces an epidemic of obesity and consequent DM, CAD and ESRD.

Second, politics and prevention are a lot cheaper than all the fancy drugs. This would probably include my second choice as well, eradication of the Guinea Worm.

By: superman

superman — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:01:01 +0000

what about keyhole surgery

drC: Laparoscopic surgery, also not quite this decade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laparoscopic_surgery

Unless you meant something else 🙂

By: 3+speckled

3+speckled — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:13:28 +0000

Biologics in rheumatoid arthritis. Hard to believe how much these drugs have improved the lives of RA patients. Hugely effective and surprisingly safe. Also hugely expensive but few people that see them in action complain much about the price.

drC: Good addition, the science is amazing, but I’m not sure the side effects and cost don’t take off some of the luster in terms of advance of the decade:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/rheumatoid-arthritis/DS00020/DSECTION=treatments-and-drugs

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:09:58 +0000

Nitric oxide! Or maybe that will be the medical advance of the next decade!

drC – good one, but I’m going to think of that one as 1990’s:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1998/press.html

How about rotavirus vaccines?

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:47:26 +0000

These are really fantastic choices, and I think the Gleevec addition is an important one. I’m torn between two women’s health ones — the WHI study on HRT and the HPV vaccine — and the Guinea worm one.