Cyber Medicine found its way under the Christmas Tree

   Christmas Day 2017. You might be amazed what the sick found under their tree.
   A wonderful health care system -- a new, improved system fit for the 21st Century.
  Not so much chasing around town, from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out what was wrong. Not so many unnecessary surgeries. Not so many misdiagnoses. All but instant diagnoses, thanks to computer technology. And, these were more thorough diagnoses than anyone previously had thought possible.
   All this, and it was not nearly so expensive.
   Much of the year leading up to Christmas, Congress had tried and tried to come up with a better system. So, it was surprising that when the ill and the lame and the sick found their present under tree, it was completely different than what had been discussed for them all along.
   I should tell you how it worked, so you can see it is possible.
   Medicine had gone astray when it got too sectionalized and too specialized. When you have to go to one doctor to look at the circulation in your legs, and he's  on one side of town, and you have to go to another to look at your spine, and he's on the other side of town, sometimes only half the problem gets diagnosed. The first doctor in identifies a problem and the other doctor isn't even visited and a problem goes undiagnosed.
    Remember the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and how one man touched the trunk and thought it was like a snake, and another touched the leg and thought it like a pillar like a tree trunk? When the medical world created specialties, it created doctors blind to the different parts of the problems.
   Enter the Christmas present of 2017. Oh, before we introduce it, we should notice that this is the 21st Century, and there is all this talk of computers taking over from humans. Alas, I fear medicine is an area where computers could be of immense benefit.
   So, the present for the sick, ill and diseased that Christmas morning? Cyber medicine. You walked into a health center, and a technician awaited you. His job was to make sure all beneficial tests were done and all the pertinent information was entered in the computer. An MRI was part of this. Now, whereas in the past, an MRI targeted just the problem area that was suspected, this was a full-body MRI. In the past, it would have taken a technician quite a time to read a full-body MRI, but with computers, it was all but instantaneous.
   Unnecessary surgeries? The computer was pretty exact on when surgeries were necessary.
  And, they took the MRIs as often as desired, many of these being locational instead of being full-body scans. You wonder if chiropractic works? Well, MRIs were taken both before and after, showing whether any bone movement was taking place. And, that was not expensive. Once you own the machine, it is but the cost of the film, or whatever, that is the expense, if I am correct. So, run the MRIs as often as you need and don't charge $2500 a shot.
   Unlike the day when one doctor looked at one part of the body and another looked at another, the computer looked at everything and could better see if one problem was affecting another. Integrated health care had arrived. Everything was under one roof and it was no longer necessary to chase back and forth across town. Misdiagnoses all but disappeared. And, since there was no longer a need for so many expensive doctors, the bottom dropped out of the prices.
   The thing about the present the sick found under their tree that Christmas Day in 2017, is that this really could be done. We could have a health care system like this. All the technology is in place, we just need to do it.