Space Medicine

A hospital in space would require a complete rethinking of how doctors perform different treatments. A question that has always interested me is how would doctors perform surgery on a patient? It would take exceptional skill. Patients would have to be strapped down so that they do not float away while doctors are operating on them. Additionally, doctors would have to be careful to ensure that a patient’s internal organs are not negatively affected by the direct exposure to micro gravity.

I do not think it would be wise to use robots, when humans still need to figure out how a human doctor could perform a surgery. I think that using a highly experienced human medical doctor would be a smarter, safer choice.

Additionally, new technology must be created for any surgeries and medical operations that involve treating internal bleeding. It would be highly problematic if the blood started floating away due to the micro gravity.

The last part of my response is a purely hypothetical scenario. Say human astronauts were to encounter an alien virus or disease on another planet. We would treat the disease in several ways. One, an obvious one at that, is that the disease could not be sent back to Earth to be studied until there is a vaccine. The last thing anyone needs is an alien pandemic causing problems on Earth without any idea how to treat it. Two is to discover how the disease works. Does it use DNA? RNA? Something else entirely? If it does not use DNA or RNA, how does it interact and cause harm within our bodies (which are based on DNA and RNA)? Three is to take that knowledge gained by studying the disease and to create a cure and/or a vaccine to prevent the disease.