The future of medicine looks a lot like a science fiction movie, with disease-detecting laser beams and patients placed into "suspended animation" during emergency surgery.
This stuff is straight out of Star Trek.
In what could turn into one of the most revolutionary advances in medical history, scientists are developing a way to "freeze" patients during surgery.
This cutting-edge technique involves quickly replacing all the blood in a trauma victim's body with a cold saline solution that rapidly brings the temperature down from the normal 98.6 degrees to 50 degrees, well past the point of extreme hypothermia.
That's also well past the point of death--but scientists say they can cool the body so quickly that the cells that cause death don't have time to act.
The result: suspended animation, a state in which nothing in the body is working--no brainwaves, no pulse, no blood pressure, no organ function--but the patient isn't dead.
The technique could save lives in the emergency room, where trauma victims often die because they arrive with just minutes to live--and doctors simply don't have enough time to perform life-saving procedures.
Incredibly, this new technique has worked in animal experiments. Human tests are next--and if they're successful, doctors could have hours where they once had minutes.
"By cooling rapidly in this fashion we can convert almost certain death into a 90 percent survival rate," Dr Hasan Alam, the surgeon leading the research at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the BBC.
And for those of us facing less-immediate threats, another futuristic tool could soon make its way to our doctor's office: a disease-detecting laser beam.
It's called Raman spectroscopy, and it uses optical fibers to deliver a beam of laser light. The data it generates can be used to determine the chemical makeup of tissue--and since diseased tissue has a different chemical makeup from healthy tissue, researchers say the technique may be able to spot everything from cancer to tooth decay.
The University of Michigan researcher working on this believes the non-invasive technique may someday replace X- rays, blood tests and other diagnostic procedures... with no radiation and no pain.
He predicts that it will be in wide use within five years.
The real question is whether new tools like Raman spectroscopy will be used to save the people who need to be saved... or just lead to more overdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments.
Some conditions--colon cancer, certain bacterial infections and actual damage to tissue, muscle or bone-- clearly need to be taken care of as quickly as possible.
But many others don't... and yet we rush people into life- wrecking treatments anyway.
Just look at what happened with breast and prostate cancers. Studies have repeatedly found that years of early detections have led to more surgeries than ever before... but the death rates have remained roughly the same.
And that's going to get worse--because even as the mainstream starts to recognize the problem of over- treatment, they're doing nothing to stop it.
In fact, the researcher behind Raman spectroscopy says his technique can be used (drum roll please) to replace mammograms.
Even NASA is getting in on the act. The technology used to analyze photos taken from space is now being used to enhance mammogram images, helping doctors detect smaller tumors, earlier than ever.
If we've learned anything, we've learned that those are exactly the ones that should be left alone.
New technology... same results.
On a mission for your health,
Ed Martin
Editor, House Calls
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