WELLBEING
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EVOLUTION OF CARE
With dementia rates soaring and cancer proving difficult to combat, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all a bit gloomy
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here isn’t much that captures the eye more than medical innovations, except perhaps celebrity gossip. Whether it’s hope for dementia, a way to slow MS or a new treatment for cancer, these headlines make us pause and read on; we all know someone with a medical problem that needs treating, and we do love to hope. Many of these attention-grabbing headlines seem to fade to nothing, we
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don’t see any follow ups, and people are still getting sick. But behind the news stories are thousands of people working on medical innovations to banish a myriad of diseases. Sometimes newspapers publish too early to encourage sales while there still needs to be years of medical trials - some treatments can fall at the next hurdle and are never heard about again as they have proved ineffective. From antibiotics to vaccines, modern medicine has saved countless lives, increased longevity, and prevented millions from suffering long-term consequences of childhood illnesses. There are still many challenges facing us and medical science. Our longevity leads to increased cancer and dementia rates; there’s been a rise in obesity and related illnesses across the globe; antibiotic resistance and aging itself. Cancer survival rates vary considerably, but there have been great improvements in many cancers - in 1971 there was a 25% survival rate for prostate cancer which is now at 84%! When people refer to a cure for cancer, it is not very helpful, as there are so many different cancers (200 in fact), and the outcomes are affected not just by medicine,
THE AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY FOR SOMEONE BORN IN 1911 WAS 53 YEARS IN THE UK, AND SOMEONE BORN IN 2011 IS EXPECTED TO SEE THEIR 81ST BIRTHDAY.
but early detection rates and type of cancer. Research is being directed into targeted cancer therapies that ignore healthy cells and just attack cancer cells. Many researchers are looking to immunotherapy, a new class of drugs that use the body’s own immune system to attack cancerous cells. According to Otis Brawley, MD, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS), there are currently over 800
