Trek Battle

Comparing Star Trek Medicine to Combat Medical treatments

Aside from becoming the most iconic franchise in the history of television, Star Trek – from “The Original Series” through its most recent incanation, “Enterprise” – fired the imaginations of astronauts, scientists, inventors and those who just wanted to see its advanced technologies become reality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, that is happening much more often than Gene Roddenberry and his successors anticipated. The perennial flip-phone bears a striking resemblance to Captain Kirk’s hand-held communicator, for example, and the Internet is humanity’s first Memory Alpha. But a few of the most interesting evolutions from science fiction to fact are occurring in medicine.

Current senior military medical officers believe a rudimentary version of Dr. “Bones” McCoy’s medical tricorder will be used by the US armed forces. Not someday. Not in a decade or two. But very soon. Perhaps before the end of this decade.

in fact, the US Army is already starting to field the first elements of its new Land Warrior battle ensemble, which will upgrade a soldier in the field from just 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 up till now is essential to medicine because the on-going research and development (R&D) side of this never-ending process – Future Force Warrior (FFW) – is looking at some important advances apart from protecting soldiers from injury, but in providing care for them if they are wounded.

US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan already hold the record for the fewest “killed in action” (those who perish in combat before they can be treated) of any conflict in human history. That is basically due to two factors: Advanced body armor that has nearly prevented head and chest wounds and superior medical care on the battlefield. That ranges from medics (and Navy corpsmen) who are far better trained and equipped than before, to surgeons who were put on the front-lines during the initial phase of combat.

Therefore, the “golden-hour, as it’s called, has turned into what one Army surgeon calls the “platinum 10 minutes” – the time from the instant a soldier is wounded until he (or she) is the recipient of life-saving medical care.

Continuing advances are aimed at extending the armor to protect arms and legs – the primary locations for wounds, mostly from explosions and fragmentation, among US military personnel today. The ultimate, should the final kinks be ironed out, would be the Future Force Warrior prototype, which almost everyone compares with the full-body armor worn by Star Wars imperial troopers.

But much closer to reality are other Future Force Warrior components that may well become integral to standard military kit in the coming years. These include systems that constantly monitor the individual’s vital signs, fluid intake, even sleep, passing that information instantly (and wirelessly) to any medic. It may even send out a radio call to the closest field medic should those vital signs indicate a soldier has been injured.

Such a development may not be a hand-held tricorder, but it’s getting there.

Military personnel also will be wearing electronic dog tags that contain their entire medical histories (updated regularly), making it possible to tailor any medical treatment, taking account of allergies, how different drugs interact or other medical conditions or recent treatments. That could 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, airman, sailor and Marine also will be issued a personal first aid kit that contains, among other things, a single-handed tourniquet and special bandages that instantly clot the blood to stop bleeding (rapid blood loss is the number one cause of death on the battlefield). Each also will be trained in advanced first aid – and one in six (at least) will be trained as a Combat Life Saver (CLS). While it receives a non-medical rating, the CLS will provide assistance, as required, to regular medics, as well as add a new layer of on-site support to his or her fellow war fighters.

Medics and corpsmen 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 audio and video, to greater levels of medical expertise, from the Forward Surgical Team operating close to front-line gunfire to top-notch 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.

A few of these elements are already 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 whether brain injury has occurred and how severe that injury might be

Automatic controls built into ventilators, that allows medics to deliver a level of resuscitation currently only available from intensive-care nurses

Hand-held ultrasounds that can pinpoint internal injuries

A digital handbook of diagnostic and treatment protocols medics can carry into combat

Turning ordinary air into medical-grade oxygen with small portable oxygen generators

A system that can quickly identify and diagnose 10 biologic weapons threats, including anthrax, smallpox and 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 these advances are aimed at providing quick, effective medical treatment to war fighters, they will also become an integral part of the medical resources US forces will be able to provide to civilians and enemy combatants.

Prior to the current conflict, US military medicine was not intended to care for the elderly, children or disease and illness not found among the young, physically fit members of the armed forces. Now – and to an even bigger extent in the future – such care will be integral to the training and equipment the Navy, Army and Air Force will take to war and to humanitarian and disaster relief missions, also.

Within the careers of some in uniform today, future civilian and military research and development may go even further than the doctors of Star Trek could do. The Surgeon General of the Army, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, has written that he thinks one of the “most exciting possibilities in modern medicine” is the ability to repair or re-grow lost or damaged tissues and limbs. “Regenerative medicine”, Kiley says, is the subject of propitious 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 hence. It may well be, though, that “Bones” could 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!

Bad Star Trek Fight Scene