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Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications

Product ID: Math Today
Supplementary Print
High School

Drugs and Blocks

Author: Joseph Malkevitch



When your doctor prescribes a new drug or treatment (medical or surgical), your hope is that the condition that required intervention will be cured. You also hope that the cure will be speedy and safe; that is, in the process of making the situation you have better, it does not create a new problem or make an existing problem worse.

Post World War II medicine has radically changed the way the public thinks about medical care. We have antibiotics, antiviral drugs, vaccines, and new technologies that make it possible to "see" the situation within our body of both bone and soft tissue.

After a visit to the doctor we have come to expect a quick and safe cure, unless we have developed cancer, and even for many types of cancer great progress has been made. Unfortunately, there are some signs that these expectations require modification: The bacteria and viruses are adapting to the environment, so that drugs and treatments that sometimes worked in the past are no longer efficacious.
©2006 by COMAP, Inc.
Consortium 91
3 pages

Mathematics Topics:

Statistics, Geometry

Application Areas:

Medicine, scheduling

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