For us up to this point, there has been great pressure to use technology in medicine. Any time a technological innovation is discovered, it is rapidly adopted by the medical profession. Again, I'll use computed tomography as an example. By the time the EMI scanner was first made available in the United States in 1972, within four years computed tomography was a common finding in major U.S. hospitals. Sometimes I think perhaps we in the medical profession adopt a technology too quickly without considering what it gives us compared to how much it costs, but there is an imperative to use technology in medicine, and it is rapidly adopted.
Modern medicine is based on the scientific method.
There have been precedents in medicine in the past. Medicine developed by the Romans, for example, military medicine, was advanced, but all the lessons that the Romans learned were forgotten in the Dark Ages, and things actually regressed, as far as medical care was concerned, because of religious bias, superstition, reliance on scholastic reasoning to generate knowledge, and the fact that scientists of the time ignored the facts, ignored things they observed or measured, so that medicine actually slipped backwards. In military medicine we did not regain the level achieved by the Romans until the year 1700 or so. So it is possible for things to regress because of religious bias, narrow-mindedness, nationalism, etc. In the future we hope that won't be the case.