1.   As primary-care medicine becomes available, life-or-death matters will be handled before they become matters of life or death.

2.   As medicine becomes more technically complex and patients live longer, hospital-acquired complications have reached epidemic proportions.

3.   As taxpayers have paid much of the costs of medical care and research in recent years, however, medicine has become more of a public institution.

4.   Adolescent medicine will become a subspecialty of the American Board of Pediatrics and the American Board of Internal Medicine.

5.   Even as accounts of individual mistakes were leaking out, medicine itself has become more error-prone.

6.   Herbal medicine has become big business.

7.   It is like a ghost at the feast of information, expertise and intervention that medicine has become.

8.   Medicine is becoming more down-to-earth and practical.

9.   Pamela Bayless, a New York-based free-lance writer, reports that because pressures to cut costs are mounting, medicine has become a competitive business.

10.   Some analysts say the medicine could eventually become a billion-dollar drug.