Modern Medicine and Lessons from Antiquity

A new era of computer aided drug discovery and medicinal simulation is upon us, replacing the paradigm of test and try again. For Millennium, man relied on nature to provide beneficial compounds such as natural herbs, opiates for anesthesia, or penicillin and related compounds as natural antibiotics. Bread with blue mold was a staple of medieval folk medicine for treating infected wounds, but the common underlying thread of good medicine seems to be relying on tried and true remedies, and new discoveries face trial by fire. The last fifty years or so, however, have been marked by explosive advances in medical technology and associated methodology. Most notably the computer has been at the heart of all advances. It has enabled data analysis in days what previously could not accomplished in lifetimes, entire medical histories can be assessed and compared, it has allowed analysis of physical data revealing the structure and function of cellular machinery at approaching an atomic resolution, and it has allowed for the construction of exceedingly complex models for interpreting the data we collect. They are shifting the paradigm of drug discovery. Generally speaking, what's traditionally been done is chemists take a chemical compound known to have a specific mechanism of action, they design thousands of variants on it, test them on rodents then non-rodent mammalian models, take the top competitors, and more thoroughly investigate the pharmacokinetic properties of the drug, its toxicity, absorption and excretion. The most promising compounds then move onto clinical trials in volunteers, their effects are traced for a couple decades, and statistical analysis is applied to determine whether the drug had a marked positive influence. Successes have generally been shots in the dark, and even so they almost always have serious side effects and everyone reacts differently to them anyways. Computers aid in the individualization of medical approaches. With medicine becoming more and more of an industry, its becoming easier to overlook individual concerns, an advanced enough computer program, in a sense however could potentially act as an individual doctor.
The doctors of Antiquity laid the foundation for a theoretical approach to medicine, conjecturing possibilities and using the minimal means they had for testing them. Modern advances however yield more information than were able to analyze, and people are often too caught up on finding a "magic bullet" cure, when increasingly its becoming evident the Greek holistic view is indeed the truth. Although these tools may provide means for analyzing problems, they are still far off from designing treatments for all individuals, and then even more so there isn't the industrial infrastructure anyways to produce it all. I think the greatest medical advance will be when individuals start utilizing all the information available to them and start living preventatively instead of letting others postulate solutions.