Throughout a lot of science fiction series, I’ve seen a great deal of “future medical technology”, and frankly, it sucks. Mostly.

Mind you, the primary culprits tend to be television and movies. Novels often have crappy medical science as well, but not to the same extent. And sure, I understand a lot of the reasoning from a storyteller perspective, but sometimes it’s like they aren’t even trying.

He’s Dead, Jim

Let’s start with that old staple of Star Trek.

This is a society where we have faster-than-light travel, gravity control, and–not incidentally–control of matter! The original series sort of skimmed over that last one, but it was presented full-force every since Star Trek: The Next Generation the precedent was set that matter could be transformed back and forth from energy to matter. Apparently, control at the molecular (atomic?) level through “transporters” and “replicators”.

Let me reiterate this: they can take apart a human body, transport it thousands of miles and reconstruct it without a hiccup. Yet somehow, a stab to the midsection could often be too great a hurdle for the medical applications of this to overcome. Phaser hit? Ditto. Broken back? Ditto. And so forth.

Sure, they’d bring out their super-high-tech gizmos, pore over the unfortunate victim while looking at hard-to-read screen and then cluck with sorrow. Another one bites the dust.

Seriously, did anyone ever ask why they couldn’t use the “pattern” from the last time the fellow transported to restore his body to that state. Namely, being alive. What stopped them from doing this? I mean, this machine duplicated every atom in the body of everyone who used it on a regular basis. That’s pretty goddamn precise.

Sure, maybe they would lose all the memories they had from the last time they transported, but that seems a small price to pay for not being dead.

Medicine is Hard

*sighs*

Yes, I understand that it’s hard to build tension when every time somebody dies you “load them from the last save point”, but the writers created the technological paradigm in the first place. Did they never once consider the ramifications? That is part of their job, you know? And since they did create it, perhaps they should be creative about why the technology can’t be used this way. Yet it’s just handwaved away.

The closest I’ve ever seen to examining these aspects of this ludicrously powerful technology was one episode of TNG. It was Season Five, episode sixteen, titled Ethics. In this episode, Worf gets his spine broken and becomes a paraplegic. A “radical” doctor offers to “clone his spine” and replace it, apparently with some replicator/transporter technology. Or at least that was my best interpretation since the science was a bit garbled. But at least the episode tries to approach the subject, albeit stupidly.

The rest of the time it’s as if the technology doesn’t exist. Or there’s some kind of mental block that prevents anyone from envisioning a use aside from “Tea, Earl Grey” or “Energize”.

I’ll Throw a Replicated Bone

Dealing with the ramifications of what previous writers have coughed up without sufficient foresight kinda sucks. I get it.

It’s not like I’m the only person to recognize the major problems with this technology. Just the people with the fan fiction holo-deck scenarios have brought up intellectual and ethical concerns for the next few decades. This is a major flaw: the viewers shouldn’t be smarter than the writers.

I suspect much of this springs from groups of writers with a lot of general, but not science fiction backgrounds. “Hard” science fiction writers would never make these kind of mistakes. So when you get groups of drama writers who don’t know antimatter from antipasto, you get some serious snags.

Don’t even get me started on transporters. Just don’t.

Solutions? Honestly, the future of the franchise is so much in doubt that I’m unsure what solution might work at this point. Let’s see how it comes out once the dust settles.