One thing that often pops into my head is if people in the future will look back on some of our medical procedures we use now, and think that we were so barbaric and misinformed. Similar to the way we look back at medical procedures two hundred, one hundred, even fifty years ago as horrible.
One place where you can actively participate in such old procedures and practices, is here in Taiwan. Taiwan is almost hopelessly behind the times in many aspects of medicine. And it's not for trying either. Because more and more doctors are getting their medical degrees in America.
However there are two fundamental setbacks here. the first is that most equipment, tools, facilities are a decade old at best. This is partly because hospitals will buy old and second hand medical equipment. So even the "new" equipment, might be five years old.
The second is more systemic of a issue in Taiwanese business practices. In Taiwan it is not considered a priority or even a necessity to upgrade either your staff or your equipment. Getting new chairs, new computers, new x-ray machines, whatever, is considered a waste of money as you already have something which works and does it's job. Meaning that even completely new hospitals might have some great things, but it might be thirty years before changes are made. Which can be very dangerous in the medical field. I'm thinking of something like how the first mammogram machines actually let off radiation. While I have no idea about the machines here, I'd hazard a guess that most hospitals are still using these old machines, or even their "new" machines were these old ones that they bought.
Getting to my comment about staff. In Taiwan having your staff continue to learn more, take more classes, learn new skills is actually considered a bad thing. It takes away from their time to work. As such I do not know any company in Taiwan which actually encourages their employees to stay up to date and get more training. Which of course means that to my knowledge there is no company which pays for their employes to take classes to further their knowledge or even get some license.
Meaning that for many doctors, their knowledge base doesn't grow while they are a doctor. I have been to many popular doctors who actually have no idea about the developments in their field in the last decade or even longer. You also get this weird gap where newly graduated doctors will actually know more about recent medical advancements than their more experience colleagues.
All these things come together to mean that most medical procedures, treatments, etc in Taiwan are at best a few years behind the rest of the world. Many times I and other foreigners have gone to get medical attention armed with the latest knowledge of how these conditions are treated, only to find most doctors don't know about it, or at best find some who know about it but admit that Taiwan is not set up for those types of treatments.
All that being said, Taiwan does have it's benefits. The national health insurance is pretty good. So most procedures and treatments are extremely cheap. and the private health insurance here is ridiculous to the point where if you do need medical attention you can actually make a profit. So for many foreigners it's a tough decision. Go back home and get the best care possible, or stay here and get lower quality care but at a much cheaper price.
The picture above is of some medical tools used in Taiwan more than sixty years ago. I believe these are for ear, nose, and throat doctors. I have some experience with these doctors here in Taiwan. Mainly going around and finding out that their treatment for a deviated septum is archaic and that only now are they beginning to get the same surgeries which have been the new standard in the west for over a decade.
