Medical Innovation: The benefits and the consequences involved.  

In 1796 Edward Jenner became the pioneer of vaccines with the smallpox vaccine. In 1846 William T.G Morton gave the first demonstration of the use of anesthesia during surgery. In 1954 the first successful kidney transplant was carried out by Joseph Murray. In 1970 artificial intelligence (AI) was first applied in the healthcare field by helping to identify blood infection treatments. These are just four lines that reflect the astonishing advances, evolution, and contributions that medicine has undergone over the years. Every innovation is made to improve healthcare with either better medicines, diagnostics, or treatments, but have you thought how dangerous the field of innovation can be? Are we entering an era in which innovation can become a double-edged sword? 

Innovation through its two faces. 

Medical innovations improve the human condition by helping individuals to live longer, with less pain and larger quality of life. New innovative tools keep people healthier. “Between 2000 and 2009, new therapies accounted for 73% of the increase in life expectancy”. (New Brunswick 2014 ). Moreover, innovations help to avoid pricey hospitals since it limits the requirement for frequent visits to the doctor or overpriced surgeries. “Medications, therapies and medical technologies and devices not solely save lives — they save money” (New Brunswick 2014).

Innovation is not only beneficial, but it is also necessary says Jan Regelsberger in his article “The Need for Innovation in Healthcare 2021”. Awards like the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; which this year was given to Svante Pääbo, for his discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution, as well as the National Medal of Science (NMS). The AAI Lifetime Achievement Awards and the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal are some rewards that congratulate and encourage scientists to continue advancing knowledge in the field of medical science. The urgent need for the medical innovation community to use its tremendous successes to continue saving lives globally is reflected in illnesses like Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Ebola that remain incurable. 

Young Kelly, a researcher who tries to promote innovation in healthcare, illustrates successful innovations that have two qualities: “usable and desirable,”. She exposes the unfavorable notion of a “culture of innovation” that must be eliminated for scientists to start making progress in the field of medicine because patients, human volunteers, must agree to participate in clinical trials for new developments, which is frequently challenging due to patients’ fears considering that is not just an idea but is a well-known problem that medical errors are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.

Patients play a role in the innovation process by being part of clinical trials. Clinical trials are the main way for researchers to determine whether a new treatment, a new way of diagnosing, or a new treatment is effective in people or whether it has fewer harmful side effects than the standard treatment. Clinical Trials open the door to the negative effects of innovation, it reflects on patient safety since errors are not limited to diagnosis or prognosis but to the type of medication or drugs administered during clinical trials that are mostly unknown because they are new. In his article C. Hoffmann, “Patient safety needs innovation” through his research reflects on how new advances, discoveries, and new machines and their applications in medicine go far beyond what scientists can control or manage; this is an “unsafe way to innovate” as approximately 90% of drug candidates that undergo clinical trials fail. This is caused due to various reasons, they do not adequately treat the targeted disease or the side effects are too strong, and many drug candidates never advance to the approval stage. The inability to accurately predict how innovation will affect patients is a significant barrier since it may have unfavorable outcomes.

Make sure your topic sentences articulate a claim that’s part of your reasoned, structured thesis. What are you saying about human volunteers here? How does it relate to your claims overall about technology?

The American Cancer Society medical and editorial content team  researched patients being part of clinical trials and how unsafety it can be. They presented the term “human volunteers”, which is used for people that are dealing with an illness that decided to be part of clinical trials. Besides, they face risks from receiving a new drug with unknown side effects. They can be involved in other consequences as the new treatment might not work for them, and they will need to go to more doctor appointments or tests, which may take more time and require more travel. Additionally, participants in randomized clinical trials frequently are unable to choose the treatment they will receive, which is made worse when the clinical trial is blind. Another effect of being a human volunteer is that the costs of the clinical trial are frequently not fully covered by insurance because it only covers standard care, so it will be a significant amount of money the patient will need to cover to be part of a clinical trial. After presenting all these negative consequences and risks that innovation can bring to a patient, the American Cancer Society proposes this question: Is whether the potential advantages outweigh the risks? 

We cannot talk about innovation without mentioning surgery. Surgical procedures have changed a lot in the last decade, with new developments. Throughout history, surgeons have been the most prolific innovators of medical devices. Surgeons who delight in new technologies are often known as early adopters, they are people who make the acceptance process of a new technique or tool rapid and underpin a vital expansion phase, and as everything has its contrary some surgeons tend to be risk-averse, leading to long periods of change avoidance. In the early days of surgery, patients, for a chance to cure serious illness, sought out those who offered the latest techniques. Leading surgeons in the past were known for challenging the common perception of how to treat the body, whether it was the heart or the brain, they were known to use techniques on patients without safety conditions that often resulted in their death, this was “The era before anesthesia”.  

To reflect the lack of safety techniques that are an effect of using procedures that have not yet been fully developed then harms the patient. Burney’s 12-page letter details how she endured and experienced surgery in 1821, it is an illustration of this terrible event during this time. It also shows how medical education has traditionally focused on physiological expressions of symptoms, whereas clinicians have long recognized the value of providing safe care to patients. Burney claims that she could feel what was happening “I needed no command to hold back my screams when the dreadful steel plunged into my chest, cutting veins, arteries, flesh, and nerves.” ” I began a scream which lasted uninterruptedly throughout the whole time of the incision – and I almost marvel that it does not ring in my ears yet… so excruciating was the agony” because all of her senses were activated and no pain relief was used causing her to great suffering and emotional distress. This is somewhat astonishing as surgery is one of the most emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically challenging experiences a patient can have. (Michael Brown, 2018)

Besides this horrific event that Burney had to face while she was receiving surgery two hundred years ago, there are also other examples of numerous instances of excessive exuberance in surgical innovation throughout history. The prefrontal leucotomy, a neurosurgery for several psychiatric disorders developed in the 1940s, may be the best example. Leukotomy, the only advance in neurosurgery to receive a Nobel Prize, was a highly prized therapeutic option many years ago, and it is largely associated with condemnation because it was performed on tens of thousands of frail patients without adequate standards of informed consent or a clear understanding of its effects. (Brendan S Silbert, 2020)

There is a nationwide conversation is about healthcare costs. In Regina E.’s study “why innovation is so difficult” we can clear this negative effect that is impulsed by innovation, she argues how innovation can affect the economy, as she describes it as a “huge investment and the magnitude of losses when a trial does not work is extensive”, with billions of investor dollars lost along the way. Approximately $40 billion was lost annually by investors in biotech companies and the collapse of numerous companies that sought to bring economies of scale to fragmented medical practices. The United States spends far more than many other countries on health care. (William H. Frist, 2021)

  This text shows some examples from past surgeries to reflect the impact that unsafe procedures provided by physicians, patients had to face. The requirement and conditions that a company should pass to use a new drug should have several controllable parameters before being administered to patients. I wanted to reaffirm the idea that procedures with innovative purposes must be carried out but with care, always weighing the patient’s safety as the most important factor, and that the amount of money lost each year on ineffective trials should be decreased. However, stopping innovation will never be an option; we need changes and new developments now. Despite the fact that innovation is impacted and involves these many dangers and risks, we live in an era in which innovation is increasingly necessary and possible to achieve while taking care of patient safety.

“The Value of Medical Innovation: Saving Lives, Saving Money.” Healthcare Institute of New Jersey, https://hinj.org/the-value-of-medical-innovation-saving-lives-saving-money/ . 

Pearl, Sharona.“Symptom Check.” Real Life, 2 July 2020, https://reallifemag.com/symptom-check/.  

Youngerman, Brett E., and Guy M. McKhann II. “Innovation in Surgery and Evidence Development: Can We Have Both at Once?” Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association, American Medical Association, 1 Jan. 2015, https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/innovation-surgery-and-evidence-development-can-we-have-both-once/2015-01.  

“Value of Medical Innovation.” Healthcare Institute of New Jersey, https://hinj.org/value-of-medical-innovation/.  

Faria, Miguel A. “Violence, Mental Illness, and the Brain – A Brief History of Psychosurgery: Part 1 – from Trephination to Lobotomy.” Surgical Neurology International, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 5 Apr. 2013, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3640229/.  

“Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare.” SpringerLink, Springer Nature Singapore, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-3440-7.  

“Why Innovation in Health Care Is so Hard.” Harvard Business Review, 1 Aug. 2014, https://hbr.org/2006/05/why-innovation-in-health-care-is-so-hard 

 Kelly, Christopher J, and Antony J Young. “Promoting Innovation in Healthcare.” Future 

Healthcare Journal, U.S. National Library of Medicine, June 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502619/.   

“Types and Phases of Clinical Trials: What Are Clinical Trial Phases?” American Cancer Society, https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects/clinical-trials/what-you-nneed-to-know/phases-of-clinical-trials.html.  

“The Need for Innovation in Healthcare.” Olympus Stories, https://www.olympus-europa.com/medical/en/stories-detail/2021-07-05/The-Need-for-Innovation-in-Healthcare.html.  

First, William H. “Opportunities for Innovation: Three Ways to Streamline Health Care Administration and Save Money.” Health Affairs Forefront, 1 Mar. 2021, https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20210225.657217/full/.   Brown, Michael. “Home – Books – NCBI.” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books.