Pros And Cons Of Medical Advancements In The Medical Field

Science is advancing faster than ever and will only speed up. As it advances it creates new questions to explore, both good and bad. Advancements in science have always produced positive and negative effects in the medical field. Nowadays, as the medical advancements are increasing in technicality and proficiency, there is also a challenge to balance the chance of success and the risk for the patient. These advancements create new opportunities in the medical field, there are new risks to the participants, breakthroughs in human augmentation, and an increase in global communication. Scientific advances are bringing new risks to the medical field. For example, many hospital patients fear their information being leaked or stolen from the hospital

Some scientists are currently focusing their advances in human augmentation on increasing mental abilities. For example, Adam Weinberger, Hari Iyer, and Adam Green, researchers at Georgetown University, are exploring the ability to enhance a person’s level of creativity. They published an article titled “Conscious Augmentation of Creative State Enhances ‘Real’ Creativity in Open-Ended Analogical Reasoning.” The article describes a ‘creativity cap,’ which limits a person’s mental creativity, and how the authors attempted to increase or remove it in the trial participants. Their trial ended with them concluding “[a]ugmentation of state creativity to improve creative reasoning is a promising research direction with potential to inform strategies for innovation in multiple contexts” and a positive step toward increased creativity (Weinberger et al., 2016, p. 1). Kyungpook National University in North Korea completed an augmentation trial that tested the possibility of increasing humans’ cognitive ability. Bumhwi Kim, Amitash Ojha, and Minho Lee lead this trial and they “propose[d] an augmented cognition system, which is developed to actively assist and enhance users’ memory functions” (2015, p. 1). This study provided a group of participants with a headset that identified faces and collected information on the person they are viewing through audio intakes (Bumhwi et al., 2015, p. 337-338).

There is a new movement known as “open access” which is the idea of all discoveries being made public so that information flows freely between scientists (Gasparyan, A., Ayvazyan, L., & Kitas, G, 2013, p. 1). The hope of open access is to improve and inform third world countries of current scientific development and offer all scientists the same informational opportunities. However, as the global access is increasing barriers are revealing themselves. The most evident barriers are language and rural scientists’ lack of access to resources. Tatsuya Amano, Juan P. Gonza ́lez-Varo1, and William J. Sutherland, who are researchers from the University of Cambridge, authored, “Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science,” an article that described the problems and solution of using various languages in scientific publications. They discussed how English is now the “global language of science” which helps standardize the information (Amano et al., 2016, p. 1). While this is a huge step towards global communication, some scientists are still unable to access the information due to not being able to read English. With some rural scientists unable to read the information in their local language, they are not fully informed about their field. Amano et al. (2016) also found that “35.6% of 75,513 scientific documents on biodiversity conservation published in 2014 were