Modern medicine is overwhelmingly reactive rather than proactive. Get sick, seek medical help. How expensive that model is! If everyone only got sick and then sought medical assistance, we could not afford the bill. It is much better that most people are healthy enough at any one time that they do not need medical care—for the people themselves, for the economy, and for the whole medical profession.

It is better to prevent disease rather than to try to find cures for diseases after they occur. The reasoning here is similar to why you change the oil in your car rather than wait to fix a blown engine. This is also why we try to vaccinate or inoculate against as many diseases as possible. It is at the level of prevention that most bioengineering efforts ought to be directed, because prevention is better than cure.

Preventing Disease Before It Begins or Spreads

Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where they’ve never been seen before. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant super bug, or something completely new.

Here is an opportunity for biomedical modeling to predict when and where these possible pandemics are most likely to occur and, following on that, to devise methods to prevent these emergent diseases from appearing and needing cures. Or, perhaps, target diseases could be identified for vaccine development proactively rather than retroactively.

Wearable sensors developed by bio engineers are causing a revolution in medical monitoring, and they will prove to be a real help in the diagnosis of disease precursors, leading to prevention of disease conditions before they become debilitating. That is prevention before the need for cure. There is even a promise that wearable sensors can be used to prevent the development of mental illness. Dr. Rosalind Pi-card has said,

We want to be able to understand what these signals look like as the patient is transitioning to disease, develop algorithms that can pickup the warning signs, and provide enjoyable ways to engage patients in prevention. This would be much better than waiting until they’re in trouble and have to go to the doctor because it has progressed to a serious medical condition…. [It] is time to do this to identify behaviors for reducing the risk of mental health disorders.

The United States does not have the best record of caring for the needs of its military veterans long after they have served in hostile engagements. Imagine if the onset of post traumatic stress disorders could be detected by wearable sensors worn on the skins of soldiers before the conditions develop fully. How much pain and suffering by the veterans, their families, friends, and acquaintances could be prevented, and vast amounts of money saved, if that goal were to eventually come true?