How Does Star Trek Medicine Compare to Current Medical Advances?
Besides becoming the most successful franchise in television history, Star Trek – from “The Original Series” through its most recent incanation, “Enterprise” – sparked the imaginations of scientists, inventors and those who just wanted to see its advanced technologies appear in the real world.
Perhaps surprisingly, that is occurring far more often than Gene Roddenberry and those who came after him anticipated. The perennial flip-phone resembles Captain Kirk’s hand-held communicator, for example, and the Internet is humanity’s first Memory Alpha. But some of the most interesting evolutions from science fiction to science fact are occurring in the medical area.
The senior medical officers of today believe a embryonic version of Dr. “Bones” McCoy’s medical tricorder will be fielded with the US armed forces. Not someday. Not in a couple of decades. But very soon. Maybe even before the end of this decade.
Indeed, the US Army already is starting to try ou the first elements of its new Land Warrior battle ensemble, which will upgrade a soldier in the field from being a cog in the combat wheel to a central and primary part of a new system-of-systems approach. The success of this effort currently is essential to medicine since the continuing research and development (R&D) side of this never-ending process – Future Force Warrior (FFW) – is looking at some compelling advances apart from protecting soldiers from injury, but in providing care for them should they be wounded.
US military injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan already hold the record for the fewest “killed in action” (those who perish in combat before they receive medical treatment) of any war in the history of warfare. That is basically due to two factors: Advanced body armor that has practically prevented head and chest wounds and superior medical care on the battlefield. That ranges from medics (and Navy corpsmen) who are trained to a higher degree and are better equipped than before, to surgeons who were placed on the front-lines during the initial military action.
As a result, the so-called “golden hour” has become what one Army surgeon calls the “platinum 10 minutes” – the time from the moment a soldier is wounded until he (or she) is the recipient of life-saving medical care.
Ongoing advances are aimed at extending the armor to protect arms and legs – the most common locations for wounds, mostly from fragmentation and explosions, among US military personnel today. Ultimately, should the final quirks be worked out, would be the Future Force Warrior prototype, which just about everyone likens to the full-body armor worn by the imperial troops in Star Wars.
Much closer to reality are other FFW elements that may well become integral to standard military gear in the next few years. These include systems that constantly monitor a soldier’s vital signs, intake of fluid, patterns of sleep, passing that information instantly (and wirelessly) to any medic. It could even send out a radio call to the nearest medic should those vital signs show that a soldier has been injured.
Such a development may not be a hand-held tricorder, but it is getting there.
Military personnel will also wear electronic dog tags containing their entire medical histories (updated regularly), making it possible to tailor treatment, taking account of allergies, drug interactions or other medical conditions or recent treatments. That may also include updates at each stage of care along the evacuation line from the point of a combat injury all the way back to a hospital in the US.
Every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine also will be provided with a personal first aid kit that contains, among other items, a one-hand tourniquet and special bandages that instantly clot the blood to stop bleeding (rapid blood loss is the number one why soldiers die on the battlefield). Each also will receive advanced first aid training – and one in six (at least) will be trained as a Combat Life Saver (CLS). While rated as non-medical, the CLS will provide assistance, as required, to regular medics, as well as add one new layer of on-site support to his or her fellow military personnel.
Corpsmen and medics also are undergoing significant upgrades in both training and equipment. With the addition of a constant stream – and history – of data from every soldier and the ability to “reach back”, with both video and audio, to better medical resources, from the Forward Surgical Team operating within the sound of front-line gunfire to best-in-their-field specialists in the US, the Future Warrior Medic will be able to provide an unprecedented level of medical care within minutes of a combat casualty happening.
Some of these elements already are in place in Southwest Asia; most will be within a matter of months. Others due in the near future include:
A testing kit using biomarkers to determine the presence and severity of brain injuries
Automatic controls built into ventilators, allowing medics to deliver a level of resuscitation currently only available from intensive-care nurses
Hand-held ultrasounds that can pinpoint internal injuries
Diagnostic and treatment protocols on a digital handbook that medics can carry into combat
Turning ordinary air into medical-grade oxygen with small portable oxygen generators
The ability to identify and diagose ten biological weapons including smallpox, anthrax and the plague
Replacing blood without the need to use refrigerated blood bags
An advanced, self-contained training simulator for medics (not a holodeck, but also getting there)
While such advances are targeted at providing fast, practical medical treatment to war fighters, they also will become part of the medical resources US forces will be able to provide to enemy combatants and civilians alike.
Prior to the current conflict, US military medicine was not intended to care for children, the elderly or disease and illness that was not found among the young, physically fit members of the armed forces. Now – and to an even greater extent in the future – such care is part of the training and equipment the Air Force, Army and Navy will take into combat and to disaster relief and humanitarian missions, also.
Before some in uniform today retire, future military and civilian R&D may even go further than the doctors of Star Trek could achieve. The Surgeon General of the Army, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, has written that he considers one of the “most exciting possibilities in modern medicine” to be the ability to repair or re-grow lost or damaged tissues and limbs. “Regenerative medicine”, Kiley says, is the subject of promising research that he feels “has implications for military medicine in the near future”.
Dr. Leonard McCoy’s sickbay on the Enterprise was set in the 23rd Century, some 200 years into our future. It could very well be, however, that “Bones” would find himself outdated and old-fashioned in the midst of 21st Century combat medicine. We can only dream of the advances to come in the next 50-100 years, let alone the next 200!
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Filed under Medicine by on Mar 16th, 2009. 
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