Week 4: The other end of Biomedical Engineering

For most of the time, we are standing on the side of an inventor, a creator in biomedical Engineering. We think of research as a way for us to understand life and human beings and we are always excited to know more about the disease and fascinated by all the possibilities that we can make patients suffer less. However, when there are chances for us to stand on the side of receiving the results of biomedical engineering, we found out that no disease is just a bunch of numbers on an excel sheet or just images under microscopes.

Just very recently I went to see an ophthalmologist due to a slight discomfort of my eyes. According to the doctor, I had "very unhealthy eyes and they were my problems". At that point I was scared and thought something serious happened to my eyes, but she refused to tell me exactly what happened and simply asked me to google it. Later I found out it was a little eye lid inflammation and it could be easily cured with some antibiotics. For her, maybe what I had was just some pictures that the camera took and some numbers came out of the eye exam. Maybe it didn't make any difference for her between me having an inflammation and me losing my vision as long as I was the person at fault and wasn't her responsibility. Here I m not trying to blame her, but just when we are not an expert in certain area, our insufficient knowledge would end up leading to suspicion and scare that make us stop trusting the doctors. I m not confident that when I get to the end of my PhD, my knowledge in neurons and microglia wouldn't result me making the same mistake. I took those knowledge for granted and everything might end up being just numbers that I can process. Whether something would be effective is purely coming from statistics but I hope I would remember that numbers today to me can never be only numbers for the other end of biomedical engineering, who are waiting for those results to save their life.