Remember my Medic article for Signs & Portents?

[alex_greene]

Well, I keep abreast of many of the developing new medical technologies making the headlines. This one caught my eye today ...

Hope for bone repair injections

It still won't replace medics entirely, but I can well see autodocs having stuff like this available for even the most critical injuries.

 

[rust]

Thank you very much, another interesting idea for my setting.

 

[alex_greene]

You can envisage the scenario already. The doc leans over a soldier with a broken leg, gives him a leather strop to clench between his teeth, sets the broken bone with a sickening crunch, then slaps a skin patch over the leg.

"I'm gonna prescribe thirty minutes of bed rest, then you're back in the field, soldier."

In fact, I distinctly recall something similar as a cut scene in, I believe, Trek V - Dr McCoy gave a young man with a broken leg an injection, and the leg just snapped back all by itself as if someone had flicked a switch.

Of course that scene was cut from the final movie, Star Trek V: The One With The Laughing Vulcan And The Quest For God as being "unbelievable."