The New Medicine

You can poison 'em

You can cut 'em

You can burn 'em

You can pray over 'em

Medicine - the practice of medicine - was always about managing symptoms in order to give the body a chance to fix itself. Because three-and-a-half billion years of evolution has made bodies pretty damed good at fixing themselves.

That does not mean the science has stood still, and that in the end we're on our own. The MedNerds have done phenomenal things in terms of attacking health problems at the root cause level - coming at the problem from all angles - prevention, mitigation, remediation or whatever.

Now we're looking at brand new ways of doing things.

mRNA therapies hold promise for being a huge step towards the magic bullet. They can be "programmed" to teach the body how to defend itself better with the tools already on board, but the really really really big one: flipping the switches that need to be flipped so the body can manufacture and replace broken pieces, or astoundingly, "wake up" the cells that weren't active enough to make whatever parts some of us weren't lucky enough to be born with.

I get a very tingly feeling when Sci-Fi concepts start to become reality.

"I believe in miracles - if you dream it - it can be done"

Melissa Moore - Moderna's Chief Scientific Officer

Melissa Moore's TED Talk

Here's that chart

(click here for an explodable look at it)