Medical field cannot exist and survive without science!

Medicine: the science or practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease ( Oxford Languages definition).

From systematically studying diseases and health conditions using scientific method to treatment and prevention everything in medicine depends heavily on science.

Unless a scientist unravels the mysteries surrounding a disease or a health condition, a doctor cannot treat a patient correctly. He cannot give proper doses of drugs, find vaccines and take other preventive measures.

Clinical translation is the multi-step process of turning scientific discoveries made in the laboratory into real-world medical treatments. This well-established process consists of basic research, preclinical research, and clinical research.

This process starts in a laboratory with basic research. Basic research involves figuring out how living organisms, from the cellular level up to the whole animal or person, work and also what can go wrong in disease or injury.

Preclinical research builds upon the findings of basic research and applies this knowledge into the development of potential treatments. Scientists study how these new treatments work using laboratory models of disease, often involving cells, lab-grown tissues and organoids, and animals. Just because treatment shows promise in an animal, however, does not mean it will be effective in a human, which is why clinical trials are so important. Preclinical research should be reviewed by experts, protocols and results published in peer-reviewed journals and be reproduced, ideally by an independent laboratory, before a new experimental treatment is tested on patients in clinical trials.

If the results of preclinical research demonstrate that the new treatment is likely to work and be safe, permission is sought from regulatory authorities and ethical review boards to conduct clinical research , or testing in humans, which is completed through clinical trials. In some cases, new experimental treatments might be tested on a very small number of people before a clinical trial is started. Regulatory structures vary across jurisdictions and impact how investigational treatments are tested. A clinical trial is a regulated research study designed to establish where a potential new treatment reliably produced the intended medical benefit and is safe.

Clinical trials start with a small number of people and are focused on testing safety. As the procedures are perfected and the risks evaluated, the number of participants is gradually increased and the effectiveness of the treatment is more closely examined.

Once the clinical trial data are collected, a national or regional regulatory agency will review the data to determine if the effectiveness and safety of the treatment was formally demonstrated, and should or should not be approved for clinical use for particular diseases or conditions.

If approved, this becomes the basis for identification and treatment of a disease or health condition.

Medical research ( Source: Shutterstock.com)

Science and scientists guide the medical doctors at each step of the way in treating diseases. Not only Biology, but Biochemistry, Chemistry, Physics all these fields are helping medicine.

Life sciences, particularly medicine, saves lives. But without Physics, you don't have tools to do that - MRI machines, microscopes and what not! (1)

Have you heard the term medical physicist? Medical physicists are often found in the following healthcare specialties: diagnostic and interventional radiology (also known as medical imaging), nuclear medicine, radiation protection and radiation oncology. The term "physical agents" refers to ionising and non-ionising electromagnetic radiations, static electric and magnetic fields, ultrasound, laser light and any other Physical Agent associated with medical e.g., x-rays in computerised tomography (CT), gamma rays/radionuclides in nuclear medicine, magnetic fields and radio-frequencies in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound in ultrasound imaging and Doppler measurements. There are courses like Medical imaging physics, Radiation therapeutic physics, Nuclear medicine physics, Health physics, Non-ionizing Medical Radiation Physics, Physiological measurement, Healthcare informatics and computational physics to help medical biology.

Scanning Machine ( Google Images)

Without Chemistry, you cannot analyze and diagnose diseases properly. You cannot get good medicines.

Medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry are disciplines at the intersection of chemistry, especially synthetic organic chemistry, and pharmacology and various other biological specialties, where they are involved with design, chemical synthesis and development for market of pharmaceutical agents, or bio-active molecules (drugs).
At the biological interface, medicinal chemistry combines to form a set of highly interdisciplinary sciences, setting its organic, physical, and computational emphases alongside biological areas such as biochemistry, molecular biology, pharmacognosy and pharmacology, toxicology and veterinary and human medicine; these, with project management, statistics, and pharmaceutical business practices, systematically oversee altering identified chemical agents such that after pharmaceutical formulation, they are safe and efficacious, and therefore suitable for use in treatment of disease.

All the fields are interrelated these days and depend on and support one another.

One of my medical doctor friends told me, “ Without you people guiding us, we just go blind and cannot survive in the field”.

No, medical field cannot exist and survive without science.

Footnotes:

1. Qs people asked me on science and my replies to them - Part 127