There is a disconnect between medicine on one side and mathematics and science, on the other, which may be harmful to the public health. While science and math courses are required for admission to medical school, sadly they are used primarily as a filter. Rather few physicians seem to have a working grasp of mathematical tools and this may impede their access to various scientific and technological innovations.

To improve this situation, Industrial Math has put some relevant information on this page. The topics selected arose because of personal involvement with people needing the technologies mentioned. It is hoped that we will at least draw attention to some of the difficulties, and the corresponding opportunities.

Cancer is a common disease, yet data on cancer patients, e.g., those taking some particular drug (or combination of drugs) is extremely difficult to get. Unless genetics is really barking up the wrong tree, one should certainly find strong correlations between drug response (e.g., toxicity) and genomic features. One can imagine a powerful NIH-sponsored AI program spending full-time exploring the various patterns. But the data is NOT YET AVAILABLE! Write your congressperson and Senator. This data needs to be online - and soon. Of course, there are issues of privacy involved. Moreover, some pharmaceutical companies may not want to share. However, we feel that the public interest should be given priority and that the government therefore has ``eminent domain'' over this data.

As a concrete example, why not take the data from the federal and state prison systems? Since something on the order of one percent of the population is included, the resulting database would be enormous. As some of you will realize, such changes are very difficult to accomplish from below. But an enlightened President could make it happen.

TENS (transcutaneous electroneural stimulation) is a technique for reducing pain which uses electromagnetic fields rather than pills. Since there are a large number of different parameters involved in specifying an electromagnetic (EM) field and since the entire approach is rather nontraditional, it is possible that this sort of medical methodology has not received as much attention as it should. (Indeed, there are now conferences on the general use of EM fields in medicine such as ElectroMed2001 .) See, e.g., TENS Unit Information . (Please note that this does not constitute an endorsement of this company.)

PFFD (proximal femoral focus disorder) is a syndrome of unknown origin which afflicts around ten in a million babies. The leg (or legs and sometimes also the arms) does not grow properly and the joints can be malformed. The total number of children is certainly not large compared to, say, malnutrition, but if you happen to have met one of these children, then the statistics don't matter. Moreover, worldwide the total number is about 5000 (five thousand) each year. I include PFFD because of the complexity of various possible technological methods that could be helpful in minimizing the difficulty and suffering for the children and families involved. In particular, EM fields are used to induce bone growth in some special situations but, apparently, they have not yet been successfully applied to treat PFFD. It may be that they are ineffective or it may simply be that the particular combination of parameters needed hasn't been found. For more information, please see my page on ideas on innovative methods for treating PFFD.

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