Engineering Biomedical Engineering vs. Bioinformatics

[Mddrill]

Which of these fields would allow one to make a bigger impact on treatment of mental illnesses?
What about neurological disorders?
And if you could also explain why that would be great, Thanks!

 

[Asteropaeus]

Probably bioinformatics as biomed engineering is still mostly about equipment or designing stuff that resembles equipment vaguely.

Sequrencing the genome is now easy. Getting data on the proteome is feasable, but not for proteins that exist in low concentrations. Then there's the metabolome. You can do only so much with bioinformatics. In the end you need a biochemist or a molecular biologist to figure out what a certain protein really does.

The data will be helpful to find receptors that can be drug targets. But I would cation you on how much of a treatment pharmaceuticals can actually be.
Most effective therapy will probably still be cognitive behavioral therapy.