In such a small amount of time human kind has invented pieces of technology and medicine that is capable of diagnosing your current health problems and potentially curing them. Even today breakthroughs are being announced that scientists have found a way to see how long you have to live and your chances at acquiring diseases could, this is called telomere testing. The general idea behind it is they take a sample of your blood and by judging your telomere lengths they are able to give you an approximate biological age. However you can increase your telomeres length by exercise, eating properly and general healthiness. The lectures and discussion both had information on telomere testing which sparked my interest because of how it works and the possible ramifications from it such as insurance companies mandating you be tested before they give you insurance. Because technology constantly being created we are able to understand more and more about what our genetics and health in the future. As such in this article http://kidshealth.org/parent/system/medical/genetics.html it explains that they are now able to tell what the sex of the child will be an if the fetus has or will inherit any hereditary diseases or problems. As with the telomere testing this may cause insurance companies and others to mandate these types of tests in the future. The thing that scares me with these is that possibly in the future everyone will have to be screened for diseases, which on one hand is a good thing but on the other information may be spread and people will know every little bit about you down to your very genes.
One thing that I learned about in this session that I will use in the future is about the new types of medicines and testing that is done. Two such things are the telomere that was mentioned above previously and "miracle health juices" and how they actually work, because I will most likely be bringing at least one of those topics up in the near future in discussions or debates. In my opinion the most difficult part of the course was the quizzes because I felt that sometimes some of the questions in the quiz's had two correct answers or had two extremely close answers that could be debated which was more correct. Otherwise I felt that the rest of the course was easily understood on what had to be done and how it was graded. When looking back and reviewing my discussion grades I would have to give myself a average assessment of it because in the beginning I did not supply resources such as pictures/websites much due to inexperience however it improved towards the middle and end of the semester.
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