Sunday, January 23, 2011

Things that stopped progressing: medicine and theoretical physics

I'm surprised more people haven't noticed that medical progress slowed way down after 1984.

It's not just medical science that's hit a wall. Lee Smolin's 2004 The Trouble With Physics claims physics has been frozen for decades. (At least physics has a book on this. I think physicians are in denial.)

What other sciences have stopped making progress? Biology seems to be very healthy ...

2 comments:

cathy said...

If biology is making progress, that should translate into medicine sooner or later.

Anonymous said...

How has the digitization/computerization of medicine affected things? Are the changes made by computers in the medical field mostly peripheral? I also keep reading about 'lab on a chip' style devices. Have those not materialized in actual usage?

I guess the big question is, what happens to the seemingly big breakthroughs on the way from the research community to actual usage? Are these breakthroughs just over-hyped in the first place?

And if medical progress has mostly stopped, does the huge increase in medical costs over the last three decades derive from a new class of rentiers?