Though scientific inquisitiveness is evident in human history since the early years of the common era, proper medical inquiry into diseases and their documentation burgeoned in the 19th century. Efforts to identify the causes of diseases and their management were the central focus of medical researchers. Since then, medical knowledge has grown in leaps and bounds in three main aspects — disease diagnostics, drugs, and surgery. Over the years, medical research has introduced slow but significant changes in the way illnesses are evaluated and treated. Interestingly, most of these ‘imperceptible’ changes happen over a long period of time, though they bring in path-breaking changes in the patients’ outcomes.
But there are some medical discoveries which have ushered in disruptive changes in the way certain diseases are treated. These discoveries have converted purely ‘surgical’ diseases into medical diseases. Though surgical interventions are greatly effective in improving the outcomes in a multitude of diseases, who would be delighted to go under the knife? “Can we avoid the surgery, doc?” is the standard question among all patients who necessarily require a surgery. That was the norm and only hope for such patients for some diseases in the past and this has been completely upended by certain disruptive medical innovations.
Poliomyelitis: Polio is caused by a virus, which damages the spinal cord leading to various crippling deformities. Though the affected children survived, they were left disabled for their life, causing them to depend on calipers, crutches and wheel-chairs. Surgical correction of the deformities enabled them to lead a certain level of independent life. Just two decades ago, polio correction surgical camps were very common, and for orthopaedic students, a post-polio patient was a typical patient for final exams (often, a tough one!). But the polio vaccine, a few drops of oral solution, given on a mass scale, has almost eradicated the disease. Present-day doctors would not even be able to make a diagnosis of post-polio paralysis since they rarely see one, thanks to the inexpensive and highly effective polio vaccine.
