ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the main influences driving nano-technology impacts on medicine, and some of the directions of those impacts. The application of nanotechnology to medicine is advancing in many different areas. In the development of nanomedicine, three trends are discernable: a subtle evolutionary and incremental development path, a radical and revolutionary program proposal, and an indirect and less deliberate but inevitable impact of nanotechnologies affecting broad areas of society and economy. The evolutionary growth for nanomedicine arose from research that progressed from the micro- to the nanoscale, and from the molecular scale back up to the nanoscale. Nanomedicine, the application of nanotechnology in healthcare, offers numerous very promising possibilities to significantly improve medical diagnosis and therapy, leading to an affordable higher quality of life for everyone. Nanotechnology impact research, diagnostics, and therapeutics, and have been developed in most cases outside the context of any nanomedicine program.
