The growth in technology continues to make life easier to different people; in the medical field, technology has enabled medical practitioners to implant medical chips under the skin of patients containing medical information of the person. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of medical chip implants.
Advantages of medical chip implant
The chip contains medical information with the history of the patient; this can facilitate fast medication even in places away from the normal medical facility that a person goes. Other than medical information, the chips contains personal information that can be used to the good of the patient incase of an emergency. The technology adopted is called radio frequency identification technology; it stores and retrieved personal information of the patient when some devises and computer applications are used on the chip.
To offer quality, timely, and effective medication, medical parishioners require medical history of a patient; when patients have a medical chip, they can assist the doctors in administering medication more likely to be effective. Take the case of an emergency when the patient cannot offer his condition to the doctors, the chip will come in hardy to assist in identification of the disease and the likely medication, patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease find the method to be very effective since their condition can worsen any time (Thede, 2010).
One challenge that medical practitioners have is to track down the response and the way a patient is responding to medication; when medical chips are used, they send some radioactive rays to the main server where a doctor can access the patients’ health condition and advice him accordingly. This will enhance the growth of improved medication among the people and can be a tool of medical research and development.
Despite the advantages of medical microchips, they have some disadvantages:
Disadvantages of using medical chips
The chips need to be implanted by highly qualified medical practitioners who are expected to conduct every patient body situation and his medication record, the move is expensive. Incase the chips are inserted with some defaults, they lead to discomfort and some life threatening effect on the patient. With failure of computer technology, the chips do not offer a full medical solution of a patient; they offer only limited information that can be read from the manufacturers or feeders server.
There are some side effects that have been reported associated with the use of the chips, they include chip failure, swelling, tumor formation and infection and at extreme conditions they may lead to cancer.
Another disadvantage of a medical chip is the need for vet visits; they are patients analysis tests to determine the particular chip that can work best with the patient; this means they need to be made in different forms and types.
When a patient is having the chip, medical officers are more likely to lean their decision on the disease that the patient is suffering on the information contained in the chip; however this may not be the case always. Sometimes someone may have developed another condition but end up being treated on a condition that he is not suffering from. Although medical practitioners should treat patients information with confidentiality, there are some information they get hold of from the chips that the patients considered private depending on who is accessing it; thus medical chips violates patients confidentiality (Frank, 2011).
References
Frank, A.(2011). Advantages of Medical Chip Implants. Web.
Thede, S. (2010). Informatics and Nursing, Competencies and Applications. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott & Wilkins.