Star Trek: Becoming Reality in the 21st Century

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Besides being one of the most popular series of television shows ever, Star Trek—from the original back in the 1960s all they way through “Enterprise”—has inspired inventors, scientists and anyone who became intrigued with the futuristic technology into making it reality.

In some areas, reality is catching up to fiction much faster than even Gene Roddenberry could have foreseen. Let’s face it… flip phones bear an uncanny resemblance to Captain Kirk’s communicator, don’t they? And the internet… could possibly be a forerunner to Memory Alpha. It is interesting to note, however, that some of the most intriguing inventions from science fiction to reality are in the field of medicine.

Today, the upper echelon of military medical officers are envisioning a basic version of Dr. McCoy’s medical tricorder for field use with the United States military. Not someday far off in the future. Not in the next ten to twenty years. Soon. Maybe before we reach 2010.

The United States Army is starting to use the beginnings of its brand new Land Warrior battle ensemble, which elevates the common soldier in the field from a lowly gear in the works to a leading part of a new approach. The impending success of this endeavor relies on the continuing research and development (R & D) aspect of this ongoing process—Future Force Warrior—which will potentially make significant improvements not only in protecting our soldiers from being injured in the first place, but in treating them after they are wounded.

Casualties from the US military in today’s conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan amazingly hold the record for the fewest “killed in action” (soldiers who die in combat before treatment can be performed) of any war, ever. This is due to two things: advanced body armor that has more protection for the head and torso and much improved field medical care. Field care has been more effective due to better trained medics and Navy corpsmen, and better equipment available to having surgeons available at the battle front.

Because of this, the “golden hour” that they used to talk about has become the “platinum ten minutes”—the amount of time that elapses between a soldier getting wounded and when they get needed medical care.

More advances are being made to extend the armor so it protects arms and legs—the parts most often injured from explosions and fragments of artillery. Eventually, when all the problems have been addressed, would become the FFW standard, which most everyone compares to the full-body armor we see in Star Wars worn by the storm troopers.

Closer to implementation are other FFW elements that will definitely become standard issue in the next few years. These include systems that monitor the soldier’s vital signs, sleep, and fluid intake constantly, so that information is immediately available to any medic. It may be possible for this device to signal that a medic is needed should the vital signs indicate injury.

Okay, it’s not a tricorder, maybe it’s better.

Soldiers will also be equipped with electronic dog tags that contain updated medical histories, so treatment can take into account any allergies, medical conditions, drug interactions and recent treatments the soldier has had. Updates will be made as each treatment is given, so if a soldier is transported from a field hospital to a more permanent facility, the new physicians will have all the information on that patient.

Each member of the military will also have a personal first aid kit. These kits will contain a one-handed tourniquet and bandages that have the ability to instantly clot blood, since blood loss is the leading cause of death on the battlefield. Each soldier will get advanced first aid training, and one in every six soldiers (at least) will be trained as a Combat Life Saver. With everyone trained to some degree, soldiers will be able to assist each other until medics can arrive. This also adds one more layer of medical support in combat.

While the troops are getting more training, so are the medics and corpsmen. As the medical personnel can access more data on each injured soldier, they’ll also be able to communicate with surgical teams on the battlefront to provide the best triage they can to their injured charges.

Some of these things are already being used in Southwest Asia, and most will be implemented in a matter of months. Other important upgrades coming along will include:

• A testing kit that uses biomarkers to determine if the brain is injured, and if so, how severely
• Automatic controls built on the ventilators, allowing a level of resuscitation only available in intensive care units
• Small hand-held ultrasound units to diagnose internal injuries
• A digital encyclopedia of diagnostic and treatment protocols that can be carried right into battle
• Portable oxygen generators that can convert ordinary air into medical-grade oxygen
• A system that will identify and diagnose ten biological warfare threats quickly, including plague, anthrax and smallpox
• Methods to provide replacement blood without using whole blood bags requiring refrigeration
• A self-contained training simulator for medics (okay, it’s not a holodeck, but it’s a start)

While these new techniques and equipment are being implemented to provide fast, effective care to combat soldiers, they can be used just as effectively to civilians and enemy combatants.

Before the current conflict in Iraq, the US military medical teams were not trained to deal with children, the elderly, or with diseases not common among young, physically fit members of the military. Today, and even moreso in the future, this kind of care will be a part of the training and equipment in our armed forces to take with them to war areas as well as to disaster areas to provide humanitarian and relief missions.

While some of today’s soldiers are still in uniform, we may see the future of our military and civilian research and development surpass what the medical team on Star Trek could do. Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the Surgeon General of the Army, has written that he thinks one of the “most exciting possibilities in modern medicine” will be the ability to repair or re-grow damaged or lost tissues and limbs. “Regenerative medicine,” he says, is the the basis of some promising research that he feels certain “has implications for military medicine in the near future.”

Dr. McCoy’s sickbay on the Enterprise was around 200 years in our future… the 23rd century. It could be that good old “Bones” might find himself as outdated and old-fashioned in the middle of the 21st century as he thought we were during the television series.

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