Cantu Amanda, Author at Doc-is Art-Em

How to Improve Your Health in 2023

Cantu Amanda — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:28:29 +0000

As the end of the year is nearing, most of us are once again planning our new year’s resolutions. And one of the most common resolutions made every year is to improve one’s health. But how do you exactly improve your health? Is exercising enough? Or eating a healthier diet?

Here is a simple guide on how to improve your health in 2023 and a few tips on how you can stick to it the entire year:

1. Exercise Everyday

Yes, this is nothing new. One of the best ways to improve your health is to exercise every day. A minimum of 20 minutes per day or 150 hours per week is the most ideal exercise duration to achieve significant improvements in your physical health. According to the American Heart Association, the minimum recommended exercise is 150 hours per week of moderate-intensity aerobic exercises.

Aerobic exercises involve cardiovascular activities such as jogging, running, jumping rope, and any kind of exercise that increases the heart rate and respiration. When your cardiovascular health is improved, it helps to prevent heart disease and high blood pressure, improves blood sugar levels, reduces stress, helps your body fight disease, and can even improve your overall mood.

2. Eat Right

Your diet is one of the most important parts of your health and it’s indeed true that you are what you eat. Avoid processed food as much as you can and eat more fruits, vegetables, and healthy protein.

Avoid red meat as well, and replace them with whole grains that can give you equal amounts of protein but without harmful effects. Once you reduce your red meat consumption, you will enjoy the following benefits: lower cholesterol levels, and reduced risk of chronic disease, as well as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

A diet that’s plant-based and low-carb is the Mediterranean diet, which consists of a balanced mix of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, fish, whole grains, healthy fats, and natural spices.

3. Get Enough Sleep

Society’s admiration for the hustle generation has become detrimental. More and more people are giving importance to the hustle culture of working all the time which has led to increased levels of generational stress. One of the major aspects of health affected by this hustle culture is sleep, which can cause dangerous health consequences with long-term sleep deprivation.

Adults need at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night to stay healthy. Getting enough sleep improves your immune system, helps your body heal better, improves your brain performance, and helps you fight disease better, especially when it comes to viruses.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, sleep became a big factor when it came to battling the virus as people with weakened immune systems due to stress were more likely to get infected and experience symptoms.

4. Improve Your Mental Health

Most people believe that when it comes to discussions about health, it’s all about physical health. What most people misunderstand is that mental health is just as important. If you have a healthy body but your emotions are all over the place, you are having symptoms of depression, and you’re always in a bad mood, then you don’t have overall health and well-being.

To improve your mental health, seek help when you need to, and even when you don’t. You can try therapy even if you’re not having any issues or problems in your mental health. Simple ways to improve your mental health include having a gratitude journal, meditating, doing hobbies that you enjoy doing in your spare time, spending time with family and friends, and simply enjoying and experiencing the best of what life has to offer.

The formula for improving our health in 2023 is exercise + eating right + sleeping well + improved mental health. This may seem like a simple formula but it takes dedication to ensure that you give these solutions the time, energy, and commitment they require to experience significant results.

Tips on Staying On Track

Creating a plan to improve your health in 2023 can be easy but starting and maintaining it is the most challenging part. How do you keep your resolution and maintain your desire to genuinely improve your overall health? Here are some tips:

Be Specific

Make your plan specific. What kind of exercise do you plan on doing and for how many minutes? What food should you throw out? Create a meal plan to eat better. Create a sleep routine and make sure you get enough sleep. Enroll in a pottery or cooking class for a new hobby. The more specific your plans are, the better it is for you to follow through.

Monitor Your Activities

Did you indulge in a dinner buffet this week? Maybe you should add more minutes to your exercise or have an exclusively plant-based diet the next week. Monitoring your activities helps you compensate for times when you missed or skipped your plan, as well as giving you the motivation that you’re almost reaching your goals.

Reward Yourself

Once you reach a milestone, reward yourself. Treat yourself to a pizza dinner, eat a chocolate bar, go to a spa, and simply celebrate accomplishing a milestone in your plan on improving your health.

The earlier you start taking care of your health, the better. When you take the time to take care of yourself, you are giving yourself the gift of life. You’re not only improving yourself, but you’ll be improving the lives of the people in your life, as well. Having more energy, becoming free of disease, and being overall healthier will help you become more productive at work and can help you give more time and energy to spend with your loved ones.

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Gene editing technology

Cantu Amanda — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 13:45:00 +0000

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a repetitive fragment of the genetic code discovered in bacteria in the early days of sequencing.

The first publication on CRISPR dates back to 1989. Scientists have long been interested in the question of how protozoan bacteria managed to resist bacteriophage viruses for millions of years. It was suggested that the sequences found in DNA were the bacteria’s immune system. The theory attracted the attention of many laboratories around the world, which began work to test it.

It turned out that the bacterial DNA contains information in the form of nucleotide sequences about all the viruses that have ever attacked the bacterium. When a virus enters a cell, a mechanism is triggered to compare its gene with those sections already present in the cell. If an identical one is found, the Cas9 protein cuts the DNA of the virus.

The real excitement arose when scientists decided that the discovered mechanism could be applied at the cellular level for genome editing.

Thus, the DNA editing method is not a human invention. It has been copied from living organisms. Viruses do it to bacteria, bacteria do it to plants.

What is the essence of the method?

The main components of the CRISPR system are the enzyme protein Cas9, and the RNA guide, a short fragment of genetic code for sequence recognition. These components are placed in the adeno-associated virus and used to deliver it to the cell nucleus. By detecting a match in the DNA sequence, the RNA-Guide is inserted between the strands of the double helix. The RNA-guide breaks them, and the Cas9 protein cleaves the genome. The cell triggers a repair mechanism, taking a homologous fragment of DNA to repair. Organisms have copies of the genomes from the mother and father. If a part of one of them is lost, the cell uses a similar fragment from a paired chromosome to repair it. If a foreign DNA fragment, identical at the edges of the cut chromosome but different in the middle, is introduced into the cell along with the Cas9 protein, the cell will use it to repair the break. Regardless of what’s in the middle, the cell doesn’t recognize the switch.

Thus, scientists have limitless possibilities for experimentation, only the RNA guide will change. By cutting unwanted genes from the DNA and inserting others, we get a mechanism for correcting chromosomes, forcing the cell to include fragments encoding the traits we want.

Prospects for applications of the technology
The results of the research can provide solutions that will help humanity fight the most pressing problems. Such as food shortages and global climate change.

There are many research projects aimed at unlocking the potential of gene editing technology. It provides an alternative to GMOs as a more precise method of encoding necessary characteristics in native DNA.

According to a study by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, the use of editing technology in agriculture will make plants larger and more resistant to pests, diseases, weather conditions, and applied herbicides.

CRISPR technology is a tool for genetic engineering of populations. It will create genetic modifications in offspring that will be characteristic of the entire population rather than half (according to Mendel’s law). This greatly speeds up breeding, making it possible to breed plants and animals with the necessary traits already in the first generation.

According to Bill Gates, the technology will allow scientists to breed more productive animals. Crops that can withstand harsher growing conditions could be created. Or incorporate natural pesticides and herbicides, which would improve yields. Edited crops could be stored longer after harvest because they would contain fewer natural toxins.

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IoT в медицине

Cantu Amanda — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 13:39:00 +0000

Modern healthcare is the area in which the Internet of Things is most widespread. For example, analysts from IDC have calculated that the wearable device segment alone will total $222 million in 2021 (in 2017, the market was $113.2 million). The total number of connected medical devices worldwide is expected to grow from 10 billion to 50 billion over the next 10 years.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT, Health IoT) is an infrastructure of smart devices, software, healthcare systems and individual smart services. IoMT is improving and evolving the healthcare industry, helping to provide care remotely and collect more patient information. Conventionally, all medical IoT devices and solutions can be divided into two types:

Those designed for hospitals and the professionals who work in them;
those aimed at the average user, i.e. the patient.

Smart devices (e.g., smart gadgets, sensors, heart rate meters) collect and process data, such as general health indicators, allergic reactions, test results. They help medical staff quickly generate personal statistics on patients and their medical records. At the same time, doctors can use information from the connected systems to treat patients more effectively, provide them with timely and appropriate care, and prevent exacerbations of chronic diseases.

The main benefits of using smart gadgets and smart medical solutions are:

hospital staff mobility and productivity are improved;
faster processing of patient data;
the risk of error and miscalculation due to human error is reduced;
lower treatment costs.

According to a 2017 Accenture study, three-quarters of healthcare executives believe IoT will revolutionize medicine in the next few years. This mainly applies to three areas: remote patient monitoring, prevention of chronic exacerbations (through wearable devices) and information collection.

So what are the trends in the use of IoT for the medical field in today’s market and how can it help patients and healthcare professionals now?

Smart patient monitoring
IoMT helps monitor the condition of equipment in wards, monitor the condition of severe patients with the help of special sensors. Thus, such devices are able to monitor and control the health of patients from the moment they arrive at the clinic, collect and update data on them without the involvement of junior medical staff (which saves time and resources).

Smart sensors, which are used in medical facilities, are most often located on hospital beds. For example, SMI makes special sensors that prevent bedsores in heavy patients. They measure the pressure on the mattress and help to distribute it properly so that the person does not get ulcers. There are also devices that monitor heart rate and breathing. They monitor patients’ vital signs and alert hospital staff if critical changes occur.

And Florida Hospital Celebration Health uses special badges with sensors that track the movement of all people inside the clinic: both medical staff and patients. This allows them to optimize the work inside the facility: to place drug storages with maximum convenience, to create staff work schedules, and to assign patients to wards.

How to remotely monitor the condition of patients
But sensors, gadgets and other smart devices are not only used in medical institutions. One of the most important features of IoMT solutions is that they allow you to provide some medical services as well as monitor health remotely.

Remote health monitoring, or telemedicine, makes it possible to:

collect data about a patient’s health even before he or she visits the doctor directly;
Consult people remotely on urgent issues;
Chart a patient’s activities and chronic disease manifestations;
quickly provide care in critical cases (e.g., strokes).

At the same time, instead of medical workers, basic actions are performed by various devices in conjunction with smart applications. For example, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, a special flexible gadget, is used to rehabilitate patients after a stroke. They are attached to the neck to monitor the ability to swallow, as well as to monitor speech disorders (aphasia).

In this way, a patient who has had a stroke can be at home and go about their daily activities, rather than lying in the hospital, wrapped in wires. All information is tracked in real time and speeds up the person’s rehabilitation.

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AR and VR for medicine

Cantu Amanda — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 13:33:00 +0000

Performing surgeries
VR and AR technologies are now most actively used in medicine to prepare for and perform surgeries.

Three-dimensional CT and MRI data help create a virtual model of the patient and prepare for surgery, taking into account risks and potential problems. Surgeons have been using these machines for several years to prepare for particularly complex interventions.

For example, Surgical Theater’s virtual reality-based platform helps plan neurosurgical surgeries in the U.S. and Israel. In 2021, this solution was used at Soroka Medical Center (Israel) to perform the most complex surgery to separate twins with conjoined heads. With the help of Surgical Theater, doctors created interactive 3D and VR models, which allowed them to study the problem areas through a special headset. Next, the surgical procedure was designed. In the last step, using SNAP (Surgical Navigation Advanced Platform), the created scheme was transferred to the surgical navigation system of the operating room.

It should be noted that the operation to separate the heads of Siamese twins is extremely rare and has been performed about 20 times worldwide.

AR technologies are no less in demand. In particular, in May 2021, the Nevada Spine Clinic performed a highly complex spine surgery. The Medtronic Mazor X robotic platform and the xvision AR headset were used. With the combination of these technologies, the surgery, which normally takes 6-7 hours, was completed in less than 2 hours.

Rehabilitation of patients after strokes and injuries
Medical studies have shown that during rehabilitation, most patients have serious problems with motivation and engagement – only 30% of the required exercises are performed, which is very, very low. VR technology can improve this rate with gamification.

Virtual technology is now widely used to rehabilitate people after strokes and restore limb mobility after injuries. Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) uses a solution that projects the patient’s outstretched arms onto a screen. Using sensors, the patient can control them as his own, with one drawback: the virtual limbs move more accurately and faster than the real ones. Just a 10-minute session boosts the patient’s confidence and speeds up recovery.

There are examples of using VR technology to treat children with cerebral palsy.

Psychological rehabilitation
Virtual reality technology is being actively tested to combat a variety of phobias, including post-stroke syndrome. Virtual reality is safe and manageable. By immersing themselves in the simulation of disturbing moments or making contact with the object of their fear, patients gradually get rid of their phobias.

In terms of real cases, Psious VR Therapy is an online platform that provides psychotherapists with tools for dealing with various kinds of phobias, eating disorders, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

VR and AR solutions for medicine at the testing and research stage
In addition to the medical solutions listed above, research into the potential of virtual and augmented reality technologies for the following purposes is underway:

For pain management, or more specifically, pain reduction;
For the treatment of dementia, nervous system lesions and mental disorders;
To help the blind and visually impaired;
To diagnose diseases, including Parkinson’s disease;
To develop communication skills, empathy;
To simulate various conditions and diseases, thereby allowing a better understanding of the patient’s sensations;
For aesthetic medicine, allowing you to “try on” possible changes in appearance.

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Major Directions in Medicine

Cantu Amanda — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 16:05:00 +0000

Today, medicine and its technology are developing rapidly. Among the major trends in medicine, the following are more actively developed and used:

Dermatology is a branch of medicine, which is engaged in the study of skin diseases, finding out the causes of their appearance, manifestation and mechanisms of development, studies the main methods of diagnosis, treatment and preventive measures.
Gastroenterology – the branch of medicine that studies the structure and main tasks of the digestive system, diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, methods of diagnosis, treatment and preventive measures.
Cardiosurgery and Cardiology – study of etiology, pathogenesis, clinical manifestations of diseases of cardiovascular system. This branch of medicine is designed to diagnose, treat and prevent heart disease.
Gynecology is the branch of medicine studying female genitals and dealing with the treatment and prevention of their diseases.
Infertility treatment – application of methods and techniques that promote fertilization and successful conception of a child. It includes not only medical procedures but also artificial insemination.
Nephrology – a field that studies and investigates the functional abilities and diseases of the kidneys.
Neurology is a field of medicine that studies in depth the causes of diseases of the nervous system, as well as elucidates the main causes and mechanisms of these diseases, contributes to the knowledge of the symptoms and studies the ways of diagnostic studies, treatment and preventive measures.
Oncology – a branch that studies tumors, their causes, the level of their development, as well as, deals with their effective treatment and prevention.
Orthopedics is a field of surgery, which studies and deals with the treatment and prevention of deformities and dysfunctions of the musculoskeletal system, which a person has received as a result of trauma or congenital deformities.
Otolaryngology – diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases of the ear, throat and nose.
Ophthalmology – is a branch of medicine that studies, diagnoses and successfully treats diseases of the eye, eliminates the clinical manifestations of visual impairment.
Plastic Surgery – a branch of medicine, directly, surgery, which performs surgical intervention to correct deformities and correct parts of the body or organs.
Pediatrics – treatment of children until they reach adulthood.
Urology is a branch of medicine that deals with the treatment, prevention and diagnosis of the urinary system, male reproductive system, adrenal gland diseases and other processes in the retroperitoneal space.

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Nanomedicine

Cantu Amanda — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 13:18:00 +0000

We are living at the dawn of the era of nanomedicine. Nanoparticles and nanodevices will soon become precision drug delivery systems, cancer treatment tools, or tiny surgeons.

Precision Surgery
Innovations in medical nanotechnology are already making surgical procedures orders of magnitude more precise and safe.

The revolutionary SurgeLight system developed and already in test use at the Jules Bordet Institute in Belgium allows the precise visualization of different tissue types, blood vessels and nerves in real time during surgery.

To create this system, Belgian scientists developed special fluorescent nanobots. These are nanoparticles 100-150 nm in size, capable of accumulating in a strictly defined type of body tissue. Inside such a particle is a fluorescent molecule that emits light of a strictly defined wavelength.

When treating the operation area with these nanoparticles, the surgeon sees in a special microscope a colored picture, where blood vessels, muscles, connective tissue and other structures are colored, each in its own color. The area of the malignant lesion can also be highlighted in color.

This makes it easy to navigate and remove only what is needed without traumatizing healthy tissue or damaging vessels and nerves.

The SurgeLight system received the highest award at the prestigious Med Tech ’19 world exhibition of medical innovations.

Innovative medicine in Belgium

Nanotherapy for cancer
This technology has become one of the most important medical innovations of our time.

Nanotherapy devices are popular because of their high precision and lower overall cost compared to immunotherapy and targeted drugs when used to treat cancer.

Nanoparticles have a large surface area to volume ratio, which allows many functional groups to be attached to such a particle. These functional groups find tumor cells and, by binding to the corresponding receptors on their surface, help the nanoparticle to penetrate inside. Inside the cancer cell, they release a substance that causes the cell to die and eventually destroy the tumor.

Common nanoparticles are made of metals such as silver and gold, which are in the 15-200 nm range.

The Center for Innovative Medicine InhaTarget Therapeutics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) has developed and already plans to introduce two such drugs into clinical practice.

These drugs, Cisplatin-based DPI and Paclitaxel-based DPI, are designed to treat lung cancer. Acting only on tumor cells, they (in comparison with classic drugs) have virtually no side effects. The ability to use them in high concentrations provides the best therapeutic effect. And the inhalation form of delivery makes these drugs very comfortable for patients to use on their own.

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Medieval Medicine

Cantu Amanda — Sun, 09 May 2021 12:34:00 +0000

The Middle Ages, especially the early and middle ages, are perceived as a dark time of decline in scientific medical knowledge, plunging Europe into epidemics that wiped out entire settlements. Doctors at this time were regarded with great wariness, more as servants of the devil, steeped in magic than as people helping society, hygiene was declared harmful (one of the popular theories of that time in Europe was that one should wash as little as possible, since water was the source of disease). The main remedy was prayer, and the real doctor was the priest. Europe paid dearly for this scientific regression, it paid with terrible epidemics of plague, typhus, cholera and other severe infections. It was only in the late Middle Ages that the situation began to change. The understanding of where serious infections came from, the importance of hygiene (for example, the famous German adherence to cleanliness comes from there, when city dwellers were severely punished for unsanitary conditions), doctors were no longer demonized, and they were able to return to a scientific medical approach.

Vitruvian ManA prominent European (Swiss-born) physician who lived at the junction of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, an era of dissipating darkness that prefigured the Renaissance that followed, was a man known by the pseudonym Paracelsus. His real name was Philip Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. He became famous for his revolutionary views on medicine, rejecting blind adherence to the authorities of antiquity. For this he was excommunicated from teaching and declared a fraud by his Nuremberg colleagues in the medical profession. In response to this accusation, Paracelsus offered to entrust him with the treatment of three patients who were deemed hopeless. There are documents in the city archives of Nuremberg certifying that he cured these three patients who were considered incurable, and in a fairly short time and for free – and restored his reputation. Paracelsus died suddenly and early, at the age of 48, and there is reason to believe that his death was not natural, but the result of an attack paid for by one of his jealous colleagues. During his short but very fruitful life Paracelsus managed to make a major contribution to the development of medicine as a science, gave an understanding of man as a holistic organism, a microcosm in macrocosm, breathed new life into pharmacology.

During the Renaissance, the understanding of medicine as a science returns and it begins its rapid growth, perhaps comparable in importance only with the ancient Greek period. Here are just a few of the scientists whose contributions to medicine at that time played a very important role and greatly contributed to the advances we enjoy today.

Leonardo Da Vinci – performed autopsies and sketched the results in detail. His drawings served as an anatomical atlas; he is credited with the discovery of the cerebral aqueduct, the maxillary sinus, and the cardiac conduction system.

Girolamo Frocastro was the progenitor of epidemiology. He described infectious diseases, including typhoid, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and the ways in which they spread.

André Vesalius – made a great contribution to the development of anatomy, described the cardiovascular system as it is known today.

Eustachius Bartolomeo – studied the organ of hearing (the Eustachian tube connecting the ear to the nasopharynx is named after him) and the vascular system.

Ambroise Paré – founder of military surgery, created a manual on treatment of various wounds caused by weapons (for example, before him it was believed that gunshot wounds should be treated with boiling oil and red-hot iron).

William Garvey was a prominent English physician, the founder of modern circulatory physiology, who also made discoveries in embryology.

This period was a time of accumulation of knowledge about human nature, as well as about various diseases and their treatments. All this basis prepared the scientific breakthrough that followed.

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Precision Medicine

Cantu Amanda — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 13:23:00 +0000

No two patients in the world are alike, and not only because the disease can affect different organs. Certain characteristics of the same disease can also vary from patient to patient. Researchers are developing medical test systems to detect such differences. By examining blood and tissue samples, collecting and analyzing genetic information, scientists seek to identify specific characteristics of the disease. Based on the data collected, it becomes possible to treat patients with an “individualized” drug that is ideally “suited” to the particular case. This form of targeted therapy, based on a prior diagnosis, is called precision medicine.

Thus, precision medicine is a branch of medicine that uses information about human genes, proteins and internal environment to prevent, diagnose and treat disease. Precision medicine is used for many diseases, including cancer, coronary heart disease, HIV/AIDS, hyperlipidemia, cystic fibrosis, and alcohol abuse disorders. Precision medicine in the context of oncology refers to the use of therapeutic interventions that are expected to benefit a subset of patients who have specific molecular or cellular features of the malignancy, such as genomic changes or protein expression patterns.

In the previous period, treatment recommendations were based primarily on pathologic characteristics of the tumor. Thanks to precision medicine, recommendations can target amenable genomic drivers regardless of localization, tumor origin, or histological type.

Thus, in 30-49% of patients who undergo genomic profiling of a tumor, there may be treatable changes, for some of which an approved or investigational drug can be selected. Advances in genome sequencing technology have facilitated the use of precision medicine in oncology.

Oncology is at the forefront of precision medicine: by 2019, for example, more than 160 cancer biomarkers have been approved, and more than 90 percent of key studies target molecular targets.

Precision medicine has been successfully used to identify patients with amenable mutations that would benefit from targeted therapies, as well as tumor markers to aid in diagnosis.

Patients with targeted therapies may benefit more than patients who receive therapies without target matching. Targeted drugs have fewer side effects, and their use can prevent exposure to unnecessary, ineffective treatment regimens. Through the use of precision medicine, patients can achieve very high response rates to systemic treatment.

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The Medicine of Antiquity

Cantu Amanda — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:30:00 +0000

The healer was a priest because, in the end, his appeal to the gods and how persuasive his appeal to them would be, depended on the health and life of the sick. The healer was a priest because, ultimately, the patient’s health and life depended on the goodwill of the gods and how persuasive his or her appeal to them was. In a Pyrenean cave, there is a petroglyph of such a Cro-Magnon healer, dressed in an animal skin, with deer antlers on his head.

At that time, people accumulated empirical knowledge about the properties of certain plants and minerals. This knowledge was often erroneous, i.e., plants were ascribed properties which they did not have, but there were also correct data. For example, the Incas discovered the tonic effect of cacao beans, the therapeutic properties of mate, and the narcotic effect of coca leaves. Such information was accumulated, laying the foundation for future pharmacology. It should be noted that many of the discoveries of our ancient ancestors are used in modern medicine.

Medicine in Ancient Greece
Daughter of Asclepius, the god of medicineAlthough the first written medical sources that have reached us are Egyptian papyri, which describe, in particular, surgical operations and obstetrical practices (Berlin, London, Leiden papyri), the place of origin of modern medicine is considered to be ancient Greece, though there is no doubt that its sources are from the same Ancient Egypt.

The ancient Greeks can be considered the founders of scientific thought as such, and of medicine in particular, because it was here that medicine as a science appeared. This means that the Greeks undertook a scientific approach to the information accumulated by that time, although certainly not all of it was reliable. At this time, medicine was divided into temple medicine and, if I may say so, scientific, or evidence-based medicine. Schools emerged in different cities of Greece, each of which developed certain scientific (or pseudoscientific) theories. The god of medicine among the Greeks was Asclepius, son of Apollo, the Roman pronunciation is Aesculapius. Medicines were called “pharmakon” by the Greeks. Asclepius had children, each of whom embodied a particular branch of medicine: Hygiea – hygiene, prevention, Panacea – therapy, Machaon – surgery, Podalarius – internal diseases, Telesphorus – magic. Thus we see that at this time there was already a division of medicine into the main directions, which as a whole have reached our days.

The father of medicine is called the man who founded one of the Greek schools of medicine and devoted his whole life to medicine – Hippocrates. His influence on medicine as a science cannot be overestimated. His numerous writings, which contain descriptions of practices used by physicians to this day, are grouped together in a large collection – the Hippocratic Corpus, the first medical encyclopedia. In addition, as not only a physician but also an outstanding philosopher and thinker, he laid the foundations of medical ethics, and the famous Hippocratic Oath has survived almost unchanged to the present day as a mark of respect for this great man.

Medicine in ancient Rome
After the unprecedented rise of Greek medicine, one would have expected it to continue its upward development in Rome, which became the successor to Greece. However, this did not happen. For certain historical reasons, the decline of science, including medicine, rather began in Ancient Rome. During this era, although outstanding physicians appeared, they rather considered it their duty to serve the wealthy Romans, whose main requirement for treatment was that it should be as unburdensome and pleasant as possible. For the most part, the successes of Roman medicine were due to the work of Greek scholars, especially that of Hippocrates.

A prominent representative of medicine was Galen, a Roman physician and philosopher originally from Greece. Galen laid the foundation for many medical disciplines, such as physiology, pharmacology, neurology and, of course, anatomy. The anatomical knowledge of man was based, interestingly enough, on what was learned from dissecting animals, notably pigs and monkeys, and this knowledge was used by physicians over the next 13 centuries, until the period when, in 1543, a contemporary of Paracelsus, Vesalius published his work On the Structure of the Human Body. In addition to very significant medical discoveries, Galen had erroneous theories, particularly concerning the medicinal properties of certain substances, but his authority was so indisputable that both erroneous and correct theories of Galen were used by doctors without any revision for almost a thousand and a half years.

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