Medicine

The UK provides free public health care to all residents.
Having said that, workers are allocated temporary or permanent National Insurance Numbers. Contributions to the system are compulsory, automatically deducted from all salaries and wages.

Registering with a GP in your area then allows you access the rest of National Healthcare System via a referral system. Emergency treatment is however always available through the public hospital network.

Not all treatments will be available through the NHS. Alternative medical assistance may have to be sought on a private basis.

Londoners not willing to queue in the NHS, or wanting to seek out particular treatments/medical practitioners make use of private healthcare cover.

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MEDICAL FEATURE
The Future of Medicine?
Reading comic books a few decades back, the future of medicine and indeed human enhancement looked a lot like this...
Flex & Neural Driven Prosthetics
Dean Kamen - Robotic "Luke" Arm.
DARPA funded prosthetics @ St. John's Hopkins.
Össur - Prosthetic technology.
Otto Bock - Prosthetic technology.
Then the wonders of cloaning and stem cells made it all look fairly primitive...
Regenerative Medicine:
Bones of invention. (Arizona Daily Star. July 17, 2003).
Printable Skin: 'Inkjet' Breakthrough Makes Human Tissue. (MIT Technology Review. Feb. 1, 2005).
Aubrey de Grey - We can avoid aging. (TED Talks. July 2005)
Growing Bones: New Technique Proves Promising. (Live Science. May 9, 2006).
Printing Muscle and Bone. (MIT Technology Review. Dec. 19, 2006).
(Above) The artificial bones created from an inkjet (Daily Mail).
The artificial bones made from an inkjet. (Daily Mail. Apr. 14, 2007).
Alan Russell - Regenerative Medicine Overview. (TED Talks. July 2007)
Anthony Atala - Regenerative Medicine Overview. (TED Talks. July 2009)
BBC Horizon - Fix Me Pt.3. (BBC. February, 2010).
BBC Horizon - Fix Me Pt.5. (BBC. February, 2010).
Think it's still a while off? Well in the U.S. it's business already ...
Celle - Collecting stem cells from menstrual blood.
If there's any upside that can be taken from millitary conflict & filthy rich bankers & venture capitalists, we won't have to much to wait.
And once we have it ... personal enhancement, human cloaning and artifical life forms may make us wish we'd never thought of it in the first place. But that surely won't stop man's insatiable appetite for progression. A few melting ice caps however may.
Epigenetics
Epigenetics is a ground breaking new area of scientific research. Prior to the completion of the human genome mapping project, our genetically inherited DNA was thought to be the sole determinate of our individual development and functioning potential. Medical science now concludes these genes are only expressed when "turned on" by epigentic mechanisms.
The Genome Project Summary
So we now know that electromagnetic waves and the chemical environment surrounding each cell membrane, now appear to control when these genes are switched on and off. The implications of this are staggering:
Thought » A mere thought in the brain can unleash a chemical cascade within seconds, these may even end up affecting our hornomal signalling system causing ramifications throughout the body. All of which result in changes to the chemical environment of a cell.
Nutrition » Our nutritional intake greatly affects the cellular environment.
Electromagnetic Interference » We tend to forget that our very existence on this planet is down to electromagnetic radiation. Without the radiation from the sun penetrating the earth's atmosphere and enabling photosynthesis within the plant kingdom we would not be here. Other creatures merely accumulate the biomass generated by photsynthesis, as one moves up the food chain.

Our nervous system functions off tiny electrical currents. The laws of physics tell us that any electrical current results in electromagnetic waves. We have a greater understanding of neural signalling based on altering electrical potentials, but still have no idea about the electromagnetic implications. Who knows what exposure to modern day electronic circuitry is having on the human at this molecular level.
These all have the theoretical ability to alter the proteins produced according to the blueprints mapped in the genes of our DNA (transcription), affecting us chemically and by implication structurally. The change in gene expression may be carried over during cell division as the body continues it routine maintenance roles (previously thought to take 7 years, new evidence reveals every cell in the body is replaced with 12 months). Furthermore, many of these newly expressed genes appear to then become inheritable by future offspring.
An illustration of an epigenetic mechanism
Epigenetics will surely herald a change in western medicine's narrow minded approach to health.
An introduction to the science of epigenetics
Bruce Lipton - New Biology. (Mercola. 16 November 2007)
Bruce Lipton - Epigenetics: Your Unlimited Potential for Health. (Mercola. 17 December 2007)
Bruce Lipton - How does epigentics work?. (Mercola. 31 January 2008)
Epigenome Network of Excellence.
DNA Methylation.
Rupert Sheldrake and Bruce Lipton - A Quest Beyond the Limits of the Ordinary (Part 1 of 10).
The evidence of the emergence of an epigentic industry
Dawson Church - The Genie in your Genes.
Invitrogen.
Millipore.
Quiagen.

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