Minor Medical Predictions

I haven’t been on here much but I wanted to post a few things that I imagine we’ll see in the medical news for better or worse in a few years.

One:

There will be a backlash and possibly class action lawsuits against thermal printer and paper manufacturers and the users of thermal printer products.  The "ink" on thermal printer paper often contains unpolymerized BPA, which rubs off when you touch the paper.  The BPA monomer is known to be more bioavailable and bioactive, than the polymerized BPA people worry about leaching out of plastics.

The BPA on the paper is free to be rubbed off and consumed, rubbed into eyes, etc.  More concerning is prepubescent and pubescent age people tend to have jobs that involve touching register tape often with damp hands increasing the transfer of BPA to their fingers. All of this puts them at increased risk of chronic, high level BPA exposure at an age where exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals could do the most damage.

Two:

With the discovery that astrocytes are responsible for cleaning metabolic waste out of the brain while you sleep and that poor sleep habits can lead to Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s. It is not clear if poor sleep habits cause disease or having disease causes poor sleep. Either way I can imagine we will soon see clinics where people will undergo anesthesia or other sleep therapies to allow their brains to remove the toxic buildup of proteins from their brains in order to stave off the possibility of disease. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds; people spend enormous amounts of money and endure terrible pain to look better, imagine what they would endure to prevent a slow and terrible death.

Three:

While it is possible that the increase in the cancer rate over the last several decades is because we are living longer or because the increase in environmental toxins, or it could be because we are living cleaner lives largely free of infectious disease. One of the earliest successful cancer therapies was to inject bacteria into the tumor causing a massive immune response, shrinking the tumor. The advent of modern chemotherapeutics caused less controllable therapies to fall out of favor.  However, it is possible that the immune system having to clear up bacterial infections frequently and without any outside “help” could have a similar and sustained antineoplastic effect. With the advent of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, and the fact that the world is in general a cleaner and healthier place than it once was, the immune system no longer has to work as hard or as long to fight off infections. While not being sick is generally perceived as good, immune inaction or lack of simulation could allow cancerous growths to be missed by the immune system. I am not suggesting that giving up antibiotics will end cancer but it is possible that by letting a non-life threatening illness run its course and forcing the immune system to work at beating back the infection might be a good thing. 

For anyone who reads this remember that modern cancer treatment is extremely immunosuppressive so injecting bacteria even killed bacteria into someone receiving chemo or radiation would be extremely bad.