Brave new world or future shock?

Medical scientists predict technologies such as animal-to-human organ transplants and toilets that send info to your doctor.

By Jon Bowen

Nov 17, 1999 | How will you know when you're sick in the next millennium? When your toilet tells your doctor to tell you that you're sick. Post-Y2K, your high-tech toilet, using sensors embedded in the bowl, will automatically analyze your urine for bacteria and shoot off a daily report via modem to your physician.

Other predictions are just as revolutionary without being part of your bathroom routine. Patients who are going blind will have biochip photosensors implanted in their eyes to act as artificial retinas. Diabetics will wear sensors under their skin to monitor glucose levels, with an internal reservoir dosing out insulin when the levels drop. And once scientists piece together the genetic jigsaw known as the human genome, they'll forecast your health problems years in advance and design personalized treatments to get you back on your feet.

This is the future of health and medicine as envisioned by scientists peering into the next millennium from the brink of 1999. Forty-two international medical journals, led by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the British Medical Journal (BMJ), are dedicating their pages this month to a "global theme issue" on new medical technologies and their impact on health care.

Scanning the articles is like hopping a time machine to a better, smarter world -- a medical "Futurama" where doctors use "electronic noses" to sniff out ear, nose and throat infections, where "smart" pacemakers monitor a patient's blood oxygen levels and cardiac wall pressure, adjusting the heart's pace from moment to moment. And there will be souped-up wheelchairs that can climb stairs and go barrelling through sand and gravel like Humvees.

And, in a bit of news guaranteed to prick up ears everywhere, doctors will grow artificial penises and vaginas and use them to replace worn-out or disfigured parts. Dr. Myron Murdock, director of the Impotence World Association recently told Reuters that within 25 years genetic research will make it possible for scientists to construct male and female genitalia by culturing human cells and growing them over a mold.

In other words, expect the bizarre in medicine's brave new world. Hospitals are going to change drastically, according to Dr. Charles B. Wilson, a neurosurgery professor and director of the Institute for the Future at the University of California San Francisco. As part of the admission process, Wilson predicts in his BMJ article, patients will be implanted with sensors that automatically perform more than 40 laboratory tests.

Wilson predicts that ceiling vents in hospitals will be equipped with air monitors to scan incoming visitors and sniff out anyone who could transmit an infection to a patient. Intensive care units will disappear, and we'll see the emergence of "transportable intensive care beds" complete with sensors to monitor patients' vital signs and deliver ventilation.

And in a scene straight out of "Star Wars," robots will go tooling around our hospitals like automated candy stripers, running supply services and filling pharmacy orders.

Gazing through the pages of this month's medical journals, the future looks exciting. But, as Dr. David H. Mark writes in JAMA's introduction to the global theme issue, "Technological progress, even when it is real progress, often leads to new problems, difficult choices, and unforeseen dilemmas. Clearly, technology is not an unequivocal savior. With it often come difficult social, ethical, and economic choices."

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