It’s January 2020. Shalini walks into a medical shop in a mega mall, picks up a mini device and holds it to her finger. With a tiny pinprick, it draws off a fraction of a drop of blood, makes 200 different biochemical measurements and sends the data wirelessly to a remote station Comp-uter, MD for analysis.
A few minutes pass. Shalini gets the results on her Blackberry, and a copy goes to her physician. The report reads: all your vital organs are doing fine, and your blood sugar is well under control. The physician looks at the reports a bit more closely, smiles at Shalini through the Blackberry 10G service, and advises her to continue with the special pills designed by the drug company keeping Shalini’s genetic makeup in mind.
Now, let’s meet Anant who has lost both his kidneys to diabetes. Just today, he met the regenerative medicine specialist. The plan is simple. A few of the frozen stem cells that had been stored from Anant’s umbilical cord on the day he was born, would be sent to a lab which specialised in growing brand new organs and a new kidney would be custom-built for Anant. “Call it nanotech, genomic pills, organ culture, regenerative technology or future medicine, this is what the not-so-distant future of medicine will look like,” says Dr Sanjeev Bagai, the CEO of New Delhi’s Batra Hospital and Medical Research Centre.
“Oh, quite so,” says Dr Ashok Seth, the country’s leading cardiologist and Chairman, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, Delhi, “You will have coronaries that will stay forever young, and hearts that will beat into eternity.” Adds Dr Seth with much conviction, “…and this will happen sooner than you think. If a patient’s coronary arteries were to become narrowed and did need ballooning and stenting, the doctor would fit him with new biodegradable stents that would do their job and simply get absorbed in body. No more the risk of their getting clogged with blood clots or posing a difficulty at the time of diagnostic imaging tests, since they would no longer be metallic.”
If that’s music to the ears, wait till what Dr Pradeep Chowbey, Joint Managing Director, Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, Max Super Speciality Hospital has to say. “Surgery will become increasingly more and more hi-tech, and shall be driven by computer-assisted robotic systems. This would give the surgeon a never before visualisation of the target organs, an unmatched precision that will permit him the luxury of being accurate to a fraction of a millimetre, and the patient will be back on his feet in no time at all.” Dr Chowbey has ambitious plans for his department going robotic.
Cancer will no longer be a dreaded word, believes Dr Sameer Kaul, Senior Surgical Oncologist, Apollo Cancer Institute. “With a highly precise radio-frequency beam killing the targeted cancerous cells and tumours in the body, the currently available ‘radiofrequency ablation’ technique has already arrived, giving a new lease of life to many a patient. And that’s just the beginning. Soon enough, the secrets of the causative mechanisms of different cancers will also be unlocked, and preventive oncology will be the new buzzword. Cancers will be vanquished,” affirms Dr Kaul.
Dr Apoorva Shah, founder of Mumbai’s Rich Feel, has a firm faith in the new and emergent field of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA). A novel screening test to measure the levels of 37 minerals in the hair tissue, Dr Shah believes that the test has the capability of predicting metabolic dysfunction well before the disorder gets too severe. If that happens, you would know where to turn to should you have a question on health: surely, no longer the astropalmist! Hair’s to 2020 medicine!
The author is Senior Specialist, Safdarjung Hospital and Professor, VM Medical College and a well-known columnist.