Sci-Fi Medicine Suggestions, Sources, and Ideas.

[TeufelIV]

Everyone is pretty familiar with all the fun ways to kill someone in science fiction. Hell the site has some good articles and links for the info. But if someone gets shot and doesn't die we have patch them up. So lets try and figure out some of the better ideas out there.

• We already have the well known cyborg answer. Mechanical/Artificial parts replacing organic parts.
• There is the potential of nano-machines for medical purposes but how would they be specifically used?
• We have growing new organs like hearts and trachea.
• We have quick clot.
• Automated Ambulance and recovery robots
• Spray On Skin (DARPA Project)
• Collagen Scaffolding for growing tissue on.
• "Bone Cement" I couldn't find anything detailed.
• lab grown blood
• Artificial Blood
• Laser Treatment for scar tissue removal.

All of these at some point would have been hard to believe but are becoming common or possible with advancing tech. So any other suggestions, ideas, or interesting real life stuff?

[Ahriman238]

There's usually a magic regeneration tech like a tissue regenerator or bacta that closes up injuries in moments with no bad side effects. Then there's the Sarcophagus from Stargate that does the same thing, dialed up to eleven, with horrible side effects.

Probably the most useful medical tech in sci-fi is stasis technology that turns the most stressful and time-critical of situations, a medical emergency, into something that can be dealt with in a leisurely fashion.

If it's bad sci-fi, there's some sort of animism where an unquantifiable "life-force" can be drained, stored, or transfered.

Star Trek has a "cortical stimulator" that is used like a defib paddle that attaches to the brain and can sometimes prevent brain death.

On that topic, having advanced sensors that can give you detailed medical information in moments and are man-portable must be nice. Ones that can, in an emergency, instruct amateurs in medical preocedures are also cool.

[Jawawithagun]

Implants/transplants without the need to stay on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life.

[Deathstalker]

There is often alien lifeforms that can be used to treat injuries and sickness, similar to how leeches and maggots are currently being used.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Medical tech I've seen in various sci-fi:

Vouch: From the Matador novels; sort of the medical equivalent of a robot bodyguard. It follows its owner around constantly monitoring their vital signs, ready to leap forth and administer treatment the moment it senses something wrong.

Medikit: From various works. An automated doctor-in-a-box gadget that you can stick on a wound or an ill person and it can diagnose them, inject drugs, and often patch wounds.

Prosthetic exoskeletal limb for regenerating limbs: Also from the Matador novels, I don't think it was ever given an actual name. An interesting idea; it was a hollow powered prosthetic arm worn by one character as their actual lower arm was being regenerated after it was severed. It both provided limited functionality as an arm & hand, while protected the still undersized and fragile regenerating limb.

Flesh "welding": Some sort of ray that stitches flesh together. Seen in various sci-fi works (Star Trek had the "protoplaser"), and interestingly enough now a (limited) reality. Some kinds of tissue can be induced to fuse together by the right frequency of laser.

Upload implants: Built in devices that can upload and save or transmit the person's brain state, often literally up to the instant they are "killed". They can then be revived or given a replacement body from the stored data.

[Lord of the Abyss]

There is often alien lifeforms that can be used to treat injuries and sickness, similar to how leeches and maggots are currently being used.

Ah, that reminds me of "the Doctor" from the Sector General novels. It was a sapient hive organism of microorganisms that could colonize a creature and treat its medical problems from the inside out. It could even help with wounds, force them closed from the inside.

The Sector General novel Major Operation also had one of the more oddball examples of medical equipment; capital ship beam weaponry. They were treating a being called a "Strata Creature", a huge organism that literally covered an entire continent. They had to cut away large areas of rotting tissue (due to nuclear weapons being used on it), and used the beam weapons of hovering starships to do the job.

The Sector General series also had "Educator tapes"; the recorded memories of great doctors of many species that could be read into the minds of living doctors so they could have the knowledge needed to perform medical treatments on dozens of different species.

[Broomstick]

[*] "Bone Cement" I couldn't find anything detailed.

Cyanoacrylate is currently used in many ways in medical, including bone repair. More specifically, 2-octyl cyanoacrylate which is less irritating to tissues than many other forms of cyanoacrylate. In cases of osteoporosis, for example, it's used to rebuild and stabilize collapsing vertebrae. It also has applications in place of sutures for bonding tissue layers and skin together.

It's basically medical-grade "krazy glue".

[Ahriman238]

Can't believe I forgot some of these.

Uterine Replicators. A recently fertilized ova is extracted surgically from the mother and brought to term in an artificial womb. When you consider women as a bottleneck in human reproduction (A man's part in reproduction can be done several times a day, a woman's once a year) you'll see that if you ever have an emergency and desperatly need to raise your population level, this tech could theoretically increase the birthrate by a factor of twelve. Even conservative use of uterine replicators could casually triple the birth rate while making pregnancy far more safe and comfortable.

Pharmacopea. An implant with limited AI, a health monitor, and an internal drug resovoir. Whenever the health monitor decides you need it, one of the twenty or so preloaded drugs can be released into your body, or you can trigger it yourself. Some will have a port added to your body so the drugs can be refilled, drained, or changed out. Mostly a military thing in the book it's from.

Nanophage. A nanite-based duplicate of your immune system, these nanites are armed with dozens of very tiny energy weapons and programmed to destroy any unauthorized nanotech in your body. Can also be programmed to seek out specified bacteria and virii.

Airdust. Another nano piece, from the same universe as above. Basically a lot of tiny airtanks, only one micron across holding air up to a thousand ATM, that can also remove carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The sum effect is that a person injected with a standard dose of airdust can hold his breath for close to four hours if he doesn't really move and can resist the instinct to inhale/exhale. More like fifteen minutes if they're panicking or struggling for their lives.
Works even better with a special docking implant called a nano-lung. The high-end ones allow people to go 3.5 days between breaths, in an emergency.

Anti-agapsis. Any of a number of treatments to delay or prevent the negative effects of age. This can make the lives of the elderly more comfortable and fulfilling, or can massively increase human lifespan more than anything in our history. Since so many sci-fi universes have them, it's hard to be more specific. Some have 'rejuv' treatments that make the patient physically young again. Some transfer their minds into clone bodies. Some have long, involved treatments to retard the aging process. Some require just one dose
Then there are the literal 'fountain of youth' devices/drugs that need only one dose and render the subject young and healthy forever.

[Coalition]

One I'd like to see would be nerve mapping. The body's full nerve layout is mapped to appropriate areas in the brain, and stored in a database. If the person later gets injured severely, a tap can be placed in the spinal column, and can read the nerves. The affected area and information is displayed on a screen or otherwise told to the doctors.

The other step would be in the case of paralysis or limb removal. Paralysis caused by the spine breaking would require the person to lie still for a couple of weeks, while nanowank is used to reconnect the various nerves. A limb that is destroyed would have a similar procedure, where the artificial (or grown) limb is attached to the body, and more nanowank is used to reconnect the nerves, with almost no recuperation needed afterwards.

For a sci-fi item, how about the Goa'uld healing device? Instead of needing the correct mindset to heal someone, just change it to an on/off switch.

[Skgoa]

Something akin to stasis pods is being worked on right now. The gist of it is: the body is cooled rapidly (by replacing the blood with a coolant) and some gas (I think its nitrogen, but I'm not sure) is administered. This results in drastically slowed body functions even down to the cellular level.

[Dave]

Something akin to stasis pods is being worked on right now. The gist of it is: the body is cooled rapidly (by replacing the blood with a coolant) and some gas (I think its nitrogen, but I'm not sure) is administered. This results in drastically slowed body functions even down to the cellular level.

Reminds me of a Popular Science article where the concept was to pour a "cold slurry" into the patients lungs so the brain chilled down so it didn't use oxygen as fast. The treatment was for patients whose heart had stopped beating.

[Broomstick]

For open heart surgery, reducing the patient's body temperature has been a standard practice for decades - it's not quite AMAZING FUTURE TECH!!! as the person is still maintained significantly above room temperature, but it does reduce the metabolic demands of the brain in particular, allowing extended time for surgery with minimal damage to the rest of the body.

[avatarxprime]

Actually open heart surgery is pretty amazing that way. Since they divert the blood from your heart they also keep tabs on the various metabolite quantities in your blood, among other things. Much like a car servicing, the anesthesiologist will "top you off" and insure your body is as healthy as possible for the length of the procedure. It'd be easy enough to imagine futuristic sci-fi tech implanted in the body doing the job of the rather large machines that handle that currently and them doing it as an everyday thing rather than as an incredibly invasive surgery thing.

[Broomstick]

Well, just as soon as we perfect insulin pumps we can move on to other bodily processes.

[Guardsman Bass]

They're experimenting with viruses designed to target diseases in your body right, IIRC. A sci-fi version of that (where they can engineer them to specifically target cancerous cells in your body, for example) would be very cool.

Ahriman mentioned statis technology up-thread. Some sort of reliable cryogenics would be very useful.

[Skgoa]

Ah yes, one of the things I like to imagine as not being that far away anymore is implants that 1) monitor body functions and 2) fight problems. E.g. up- and downloadable virus definitions would be a nice thing to have.

[TeufelIV]

On the stasis side of things I remember reading something about dosing the wounded person with hydrogen sulfide to stop breathing, brain function, and curb blood loss. Also the people who started on this project also suggested artificially inducing hypothermia on top of that.

Call me crazy but that is a lot of strain to put a persons' body through.

Here we go. This article explains it better and points out a lot more.
Pentagon Zombie-Maker’s New Project: Suffocate, Freeze, Reanimate From 2010 wired.com

[Shroom Man 777]

Post-organs.

In the future you can prolong your life indefinitely and have nigh superhuman organ systems, for a price. Cure short-sightedness, see in the infrared spectrum, zoom into things thousands of meters away in dozens of megapixels, with the lenses of your eyeballs manufactured by Leica, and your pupils with the fastest shutter-speeds available. A General Electric circulatory system with a post-heart that can beat at a rate of two hundred rpm. An Apple iBrain that allows you to interface with the electrosphere, and octocore multi-neuron threading to render the world around you at extremely high graphics resolutions. A ridged dimpled epidermis made by Speedo, if you want to swim with minimum amount of drag on your skin. A Ford Motors musculature system for extreme strength. How about a skeletal system hand-crafted by obscure and ridiculously expensive European companies? Your inner ear can be built by Swiss biotech watch-makers, for maximum precision and balance. Kidneys and pancreas and endocrine glands by GlaxoSmithKline that can manufacture all sorts of hormones on demand, as long as you pay for the subscription via the internet.

Consumer organs with planned obsolecense. If you use MyBrain v.2.9 in the year 2029, people will laugh at you for using such an obsolete piece of shit and the brainware won't be able to interface with the latest programs, so you'll have to get a new brain! Your old fashioned lungs might need to get their filters replaced after you chainsmoke too much. You'll have to check your in-built pressure gauge to see if there aren't any stones blocking your kidneys. And imagine, getting the hottest latest new organs and then the company discovers a fatal flaw in it, and then they'll issue a factory recall for all the latest pancreas they sold - including the one you just bought!

This will be the greatest thing ever. Postranshumanoidism will be a wonderful thing. I swear.

[Zixinus]

How about portable life-supporting system? A porta-heart? Porta-lungs? Combination of the two? Porta-liver?

Anything to keep the body alive and not kill itself in case of organ failure.

I can imagine a combined version of all this that would be connected trough the neck.

Oh, and an advanced blood filter that would get radioisotopes and other unwanted contaminants out of the blood. A portable version of course.
Perhaps connected to a space-suit?

[Number Theoretic]

How about genetic treatments or any other application of genetic or microbiological engineering? For example, Slashdot recently reported about a biological logic circuit, that can detect and kill cancer cells. Another example would be genetic treatments for spacefaring people to improve hibernation or suspended animation during long space flights. May be combined with implants.
Or, taking that to the next level, blend applied cell biology with nanotech to create "Cells 2.0".

Then, there is the good old Brain Machine Interface. How this would look like and what it can do depends strongly on the technology that is available. Or artificial nerve cells and synapses, that transmit and process neuronal signals much faster than normal brain cells to improve brain functions.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Here's one I recall from a short story, called Checksum IIRC. It involved an artificial cell organelle that on a regular basis went over the DNA in its host cell and performed a checksum function on it; if the checksum didn't add up, indicating a mutation, then the organelle killed the cell. This made mutant cells and thus cancer effectively impossible.

[Ahriman238]

Oh, and Backing up, used in several universes, the Culture and Orion's Arm leap to mind. Basically, once your computer tech has reached a certain level and can comfortably interface with the biological equivalent, you personality and memories can be 'saved' like any other complex program. So if you die, they just pull out your last save file and upload it to a new body. I can't see that it does the original any good, except perhaps to be comforted in his last moments that someone will carry on.
Also, societal stress from the moral, philosophical, and religious implications of being able to copy, paste, upload, download, and edit a person's mind will probably destroy whoever comes up with it.

The Asgard in Stargate have developed their sensor and teleportation tech to the point where they can perform complex surgery without making a single incision.

[TeufelIV]

I kind of like the idea of growing various replacement parts. Guy needs a new organ seed the growth template or what have you have and grow a new one. Need a new leg we will grow you one.

What about various genetic aspects of medicine, outside of super soldier style medical fiction.?

[Number Theoretic]

Genetic aspects could include individual optimization of your genetic material (perhaps offered as a service by some shady people/companies), longevity treatments and (specifically for spacefaring people) improving the genetic repair mechanisms of your cells and therefore compensate for radiation damage.

[StarSword]

One trick the Rebels developed in Star Wars is genetically triggering the regrowth of damaged tissue. They used this to give the Gand bounty hunter Zuckuss back his lungs.