Word: careful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Predicting the future is easy; doing it accurately is a whole different matter. But current trends suggest that the most dramatic changes in medical care in the next 20 or 30 years will spring from a growing reliance on "smart" technology. Computer chips will become ever faster, smaller and less expensive. Medical instruments and sensors will continue to shrink. (One that already has is the formerly big, lumbering machine needed for radiation treatment; today mobile electron accelerators are portable enough to be used during some cancer operations, reducing the number of healthy cells that are damaged...
...million). By 2030, almost 60% of the world's people will live in urban areas. By then, some megacities could have 30 million or more people. The population of California today is 35 million. Take all of California, cram those people into one city, remove most doctors and medical care, take away basic sanitation and hygiene, and what you have is a ticking biological time bomb. Now make eight or 10 such bombs and plant them around the world...
Cost is also an issue. Managed-care providers, eager to cash in on the alternative boom, are luring subscribers by offering to cover some of these dubious treatments. But most consumers of alternate products use conventional medicine too, and when it becomes evident that the alternatives are not cost effective and at best produce only a placebo effect, the HMOs will drop them in a heartbeat. Says William Jarvis, a professor of public health at California's Loma Linda University: "Useless procedures don't add to the outcome, just to the overhead...
...billion by 2050. The pressure to exploit the world's remaining wilderness for natural resources, food and human habitation will become overwhelming. But bulldozers and chain saws aren't the only threats. A new menace has emerged from the least likely quarter; in many cases, the very people who care most passionately about empty places are hastening their demise...
REJECTION. I have been rejected by many more elements of society than I care to recount, and when family, friends and faculty told me this would happen with less metronomic regularity if I lost weight, they were right. But whose fault is that? Mine or society...