Nanomedicine - Targetted medicine delivery

With all due respects paid to the medical advancements happened in past few centuries, we as human-kind are lagging in germ-warfare by atleast a millennium, by modest standards. The reason I say this is that, we still need to go see a doctor and he need to prescribe us medicine, which we induce into our body either by various means - oral being the most predominant. There are alternate medical treatments, which in some cases are proving to be effective, but nevertheless very archiac.

Medicine is not archiac, the way we are practising is. When there is pain in shoulder, the medicine which is calibrated based on ppm calibration is induced into the body, which not only delivers the medicine to the troubled parts of the body but also to the healther parts , which is not required. In some cases, the duration of the medicine has to be made longer (time scale wise), so that the medicine wont become poison the rest of the body. To elucidate further, let us assume that the shoulder cramp needs 10 units of medicine - but with today's medicine delivery capability (which is oral or syrenge), giving 10 units to shoulder means giving 10 units to EVERY part of the body. So doctors and pharmacists go into the bargaining room and optimize so that they give "rations" of medicine (say 1 unit a day) to make sure the rest of body is not treating the medicine as poison.

The other tradeoff in today's method is that one need to take more medicine than necessary, which in terms of economics is pure waste of money.

So how does nanotech help us? By providing us such small scale particles, that can identify the body part with trouble, carry the medicine with them in small backpacks, deliver it to the nano-patient and come out (maybe via urine or maybe by limo, who cares).

The link that I provided above gives us a great understanding medical vision that is propelled by small science. Lets hope that we live long enough to see this vision gets realized.