Collaboration in Medicine

Doctors, biologists, chemists, pharmaceutical scientists, and myself all share one common trait: we all gather our information from other people. This occurs by working together with other people to formulate new ideas or just by using the knowledge that others have developed and building on it. I truly believe that the majority of the time production of knowledge is collaborative. To collaborate means to work together to achieve a common goal, however this doesn’t have to be at the same time, but rather it could mean that a person is adding information to knowledge that was already there.

However, there are some exceptions in which the production of knowledge is an individual task, where the individual is working completely alone and not using anyone else’s ideas.

By investigating the area of knowledge of the natural sciences one can see that collaborative knowledge means professionals that work in this subject are coming together to prove theories, solve problems, and discover new ideas and knowledge. Collaboration in this area of knowledge is crucial to humanity in the sense that within this area of knowledge professionals develop medicine to help modernize the medical industry. Also in this area of knowledge scientists discover theories and ideas that help us out throughout our daily lives. For example the discovery of elements helps us to analyze the components that make up our world. More examples would be the discovery of electricity, gravity, and even social darwinism.

As I mentioned before professionals in this area of knowledge aid in the development of medical technology and medication. The collaboration comes from chemists and pharmaceutical scientists working to see what components are needed to make a successful medication. It also comes from pharmaceutical scientists and surgeons working to see what works best for different patients. An illustration of of this collaboration would be the discovery and historical development of anesthesia. This milestone alone has conquered the pain of many patients, and has changed the medical industry forever. Before anesthesia surgeries were performed on patients who were wide-awake, and sometimes just held down to the operating bed. Then come 1846 William T. G. Morton made history by being first surgeon in the world to successfully use ether gas as anesthesia during surgery. The collaboration comes after when other surgeons develop this idea. For example in 1847 James Y. Simpson a Scottish obstetrician begins operating with chloroform on women for pain during childbirth. Then years later in 1868 Dr. Edmund Andrews in Chicago proposes using a different gas, nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen as an anesthetic. These other surgeons did not actually work with Morton, they just built off of his ideas to develop a new anesthetics to utilize based on their patients needs.

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