If you've been a good little visitor to this site, you've already worked your way through the Modern Medicine section of this site. If not, please go back and do so. If you have read the Modern Medicine section (or you already know the majority of what I could have told you), then I commend you. Here's a chocolate.

This section of the site is really to support what you've learned about modern medicine, and to help put that realistic, "Star Trek" feel to your fiction. What you may be asking is why it's important that you understand medicine today if you're writing about the future.

The easy answer is: While it's possible to understand the future without knowing the present, it's also damn tough.

It's all well and good to know that by waving a tricorder back and forth you can determine whether a person's dead or not. And in most stories, that's often all you have to know. But to be aware of what, exactly, a tricorder measures (and how it possibly does so), opens avenues for fiction never yet discovered -- and allows writers to by-pass the dreaded comment that "everything's been done already".

Consider your basic murder mystery. Yes, all Star Trek characters have gotten hit over the head with a hydrospanner at least once in their fanfic careers -- but how many have been killed with a dose of catoline snuck into a hypospray of vitamins? Catoline, a future drug, simulates anaphylactic shock on a tricorder -- and since you've seen this site, you know what a joy that can be for just about everyone involved. The possibilities simply jump out if you know what to use to do what you want.

And it's awfully nice to know what you want.

The following information is only what I, in my copious free time, could gather/guess concerning medicine in the future. If your questions aren't answered, check either the Links section for a more complete guide, or email the webmistress (if the question is really interesting, it, and the answer, will be posted in the Q&A section). Suggestions, more quesses, and whatever terminology you can scrape from the shows will be lovingly posted and credited.

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Doctors in the future are pansies. Heaven knows what their night-duty nurses are like.

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EMTs of the future: Where are their stories? Who do they sleep with?

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Cool Shit (tm). For when you absolutely must neep in style.

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More ways to get illegally high than ever before.

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