By Recently a few family members and I have had to go to either Urgent or Emergency room care (or the hospital). I’ll save the details of all that for another post, but today it has made me very grateful for medical technology and the advancements in that space.
The automation is impressive and we often forget about it, because some of it has been around forever…but I’ll list a few here:
- thermometer (I remember my mom having an OG mercury thermometer reader and staring at her watch while making sure we kept the thermometer under our tongue and didn’t bite it)
- blood pressure monitor/reader – not only can you have one at home, but it does the heavy lifting. I remember watching the gauge bounce around as the nurse manually pumped air in. Now they just wrap it around your arm and hit start. And it takes your pulse at the same time. AND you can have it connect to an app at home, so you can track or you can connect to your doctor’s office, so they can monitor. No more manual maintenance of a handwritten list
- ECG – I’ve not had many ECG read outs, so I can only vouch for my recent experience where the tech had color coded stickers that they applied and then the readers were attached. I feel like this was much more of an ordeal in the past
- heart monitoring – my family member had to wear a monitoring vest that tracked her heart’s activity constantly and gave warnings if things were not normal. I imagine the only way this was done in the past was a constant nurse presence and a stethoscope
- Communications – I can email my doctor/nurse and attach results from tests.
- Robotic surgery – I just think that is cool in general
More information is coming in faster and easier to the medical teams, which allows them to act faster as needed, which I’m verygrateful for.
I got the Mobi blood pressure monitor when I was diagnosed with high blood pressure a few years ago. Turns out most of the HBP was caused from stress at a very bad job situation. Once I quit that job, my blood pressure dropped. Not to say I don’t need to make some better lifestyle choices, but the best lifestyle choice I made was to leave a company and start out on my own.
