Futuristic movies with medical scenes have one thing in common: cool technology that can diagnose and cure all of humanity’s disease woes. Is movie magic a sneak peek of medicine to come? No. If disease understanding continues to depend on centuries-old beliefs, then the ever-maturing marriage of health and technology will produce far more fantasy than reality. When movie-makers extend current medical capabilities into a technologically-advanced future, it demands little imagination and a lot of CGI. When scientists and intellectuals nod in agreement that such a future is a logical extension of today’s capabilities, they ignore that it is simply not feasible.
Instead of recognizing that jagged little pill for what it is, modern societies seem to be trying to leverage CGI in reality under the banner of virtual reality. The more we cling to the silver screen as if it were a window into a healing future, then the more disillusioned we will be when it doesn’t happen. Instead, beneath a thin layer of technology-induced delirium are the sleeping giants of misunderstanding about disease and antiquated medicine, problems that are too deep for even the movies to overcome. Let me show you what I mean.
In 2014, Christopher Nolan’s epic science fiction movie Interstellar hit theaters and the top of my “all time favorite movies” list. The story is set in 2067 when a global famine drives a secret scientific effort to save humanity by discovering inhabitable worlds in a distant part of the universe. At the end of the movie, the main character awakens in an unadorned hospital room with two medical personnel at his bedside. After traversing a wormhole twice, cryo-sleeping for years and journeying into a blackhole, he awakens in 2156 to a then 158-year-old Puritan Bennett 840 model ventilator at his bedside which, given that it’s not even plugged in, leaves the viewer to assume that it serves as a vintage nightstand.
The observation of the anachronistic ventilator, which is already old technology in 2024, is not a criticism. Quite ironically, it’s presence struck me as an honest, albeit likely unintended, projection of the future of medicine if we persist on today’s trajectory of disease understanding.
Medicine itself is anachronistic. The halo effect produced by technological advances blind many to the reality of the old and inadequate healing beliefs we rely on today. Ironically, a closer look at “modern” clinical technology reveals that much of it originated, at least theoretically, around 158 years ago when medicine went through its one and only scientific revolution. Surgery for cataracts and appendicitis have been around since the mid-1700s1. The first vaccine against smallpox was discovered in 17962. Today’s stethoscope, which started as a rolled-up paper tube in the early 19th century, has not significantly changed since 18513. The electrocardiogram, which remains the first-line diagnostic tool in chest pain patients, captured the first tracing of a human heart’s electrical activity in 18874. X-rays that take “still pictures” of a living person’s insides have been in widespread use since 1900, just five years after their discovery5.
Since then, technology has evolved to provide increasingly clearer views of disease in ever smaller realms yet cannot overcome that failure to generate theories about disease has allowed us to slip backwards into ancient strategies of thinking about disease. This creates an ever-widening gap between what technology says is possible and the knowledge needed to actually realize reliable healing for everyone.
A good illustration of the widening rift between a future vision of medical technology and knowledge of disease is in the 2016 movie, Passengers. This movie is set in a distant future when an interstellar spacecraft is transporting thousands of hibernating humans on a 120-year journey to colonize a new planet. Two passengers and a crew member are awakened 90 years too early and have several encounters with the Autodoc in the spacecraft’s medical suite. The Autodoc is an automated chamber that scans a human, diagnoses everything that’s wrong, and delivers medical recommendations, procedures and treatments. In today’s collective imagination, this device represents the archetypal future of medicine, the ideal fusion of medical technology and artificial intelligence.
In one encounter, the Autodoc pronounces a character dead, a decree that motivates the other frenzied character to select every resuscitative option available on the Autodoc’s screen. The machine uses fancy robotics to deliver a series of interventions easily recognizable as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) minus chest compressions. CPR formally has been recognized since the 1960s following several hundred years study and observation6. Do we really believe we’ll still be using CPR hundreds of years in the future?
In another scene, the crew member collapses. The Autodoc scans him and diagnoses him with 612 disorders. The farcical variety of diagnoses, including conjunctivitis, syphilis, a rare disease of the aorta, and brain hemorrhage, is only appreciable by pausing the scene. The Autodoc tells the crew member he has hours to live and dispenses sedatives to ease his final hours. Telling someone they have a laundry list of medical problems then dispensing treatments based on perceived hope of survival is what we do today.
The 612 disorders in one person is reminiscent of today’s approach. Modern medicine increasingly identifies every hiccup in laboratory results as a disorder, illustrating an obsession with finding chronic disease patterns yet having no reliable method to understand what it means or how to reverse it. Installing machines to do a doctor’s job doesn’t make anyone smarter on what disease is or what to do about it, it just looks cool. Unfortunately, if we remain stuck in a way of thinking that may be more pseudoscience than science, then who or what delivers the care based on those beliefs doesn’t matter.
As I contemplate the movie scenes, I see an emerging paradox: the knowledge needed to understand aging and whether “cryosleep” is possible is the same knowledge that will explain what disease really is and how to reverse it. In Passengers, humanity evidently solved the first conundrum, but not the second.
In other future-oriented science fiction stories, both conundrums have been solved. This is often portrayed as an artificially intelligent device that not only diagnoses everything, but cures everything too. Is this possible? Maybe, but not with today’s antiquated thought patterns. We need to upgrade our thinking with a full-blown paradigm shift into life if we wish to upgrade our future.
If you want to create a fresh vision of what the future of medicine could look like, turn off the movies, ignore medical science, close technology-oriented publications, and open your mind to creatively thinking about why people get sick. The answers we need do not exist around us but will arise from within us.
Sources cited
- Futterman, A. Ancient medical treatments still used today. Discover, 2 Nov 2021. Retrieved from https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/ancient-medical-treatments-still-used-today
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. History of Smallpox. 20 Feb 2021. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html
- Chaudry, M S. The history and evolution of the stethoscope. Cureus, 19 Aug 2022; 14(3). doi:10.7759/cureus.28171
- Barold, S S. Willem Einthoven and the birth of clinical electrocardiography a hundred years ago. Card Electrophysiol Rev. 2003 Jan;7(1):99-104. doi: 10.1023/a:1023667812925.
- Columbia Surgery. History of Medicine: Dr. Roentgen’s Accidental X-Rays. ND. Retrieved from https://columbiasurgery.org/news/2015/09/17/history-medicine-dr-roentgen-s-accidental-x-rays
- American Heart Association. History of CPR: Highlights from the 16th century to the 21st century. 2023. CPR & First Aid Emergency Cardiovascular Care. Retrieved from https://cpr.heart.org/en/resources/history-of-cpr