10 Medical Marvels

A brave new world of procedures, gadgets and tests is knocking at our hospital doors.

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Remember Dr Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy of Star Trek? Remember how the spaceship doctor would just wave a little gadget in the direction of a patient and figure out what’s wrong in an instant? Or how he would simply give a pill to a patient under dialysis to have her kidney grown back? Four decades after the science fiction TV series made its debut in 1966, the medical world is edging closer to Star-Trekian solutions. If your medicine chest is bursting with band-aids and balms, wait for it to transform into an Aladdin’s cave of gadgets and goodies: Digital pills that text, tweet or email messages from inside your body; credit card-sized lab-on-a-chip for pathological tests at home; pocket-sized scanners that will allow you to get text messages of your vital signs on your smartphone; painless, needleless injections; smart bandages that will let you know about the state of a wound. That’s just for starters. The most significant, soon-to-come advances will repair the heart, create new organs and prevent ageing by resetting the human gene code. The brave new world of futuristic medicine is knocking at our doors. Get ready for an uncharted ride into unimaginable realities. It’s new biology for a new century: With ideas and tools from physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering, the new science has spawned innovations that promise new ways to diagnose, treat, probe and prevent diseases. The use and purpose of medicine is clearly changing. We look at 10 extraordinary medical inventions poised to change the way we live.