Customised gifts? Now customised surgery...

With increasing amount of options being available to the consumer at their fingertips, they are spoilt for choice.
Also as the consumer becomes more literate, and more vigilant (thanks to so many activists campaigns), health care may just be the next step.

1 January, 1990 : no wraps or burgers
Post 1991 : just choose which meal you want to eat
2017:

At Subway : first choose your bread and its length, then specify the fillings and finally the sauces.
In the hospital : the patient Just gives his consent for the surgery without asking any question

Year 2037 :
While the subway story might still remain the same
There will be a revolution in doctor patient relationship
Here is how it may sound like....

Scene 1-
Doctor : You have right sided uncomplicated reducible inguinal hernia

Patient : what are the treatment options ?

Doctor :
Please create your account and log into our app, where you will have complete control over your healthcare.
I hope you have an Aadhar card, it's compulsory for registration you see. Else I can't treat you.

After registering, you will have to link your insurance details and bank account details to authorise bank transactions. The app will debit 50% of your amount directly, while the remaining 50% had to be paid in cash (hints as- under the table)

Please note that Hernia surgery has been placed under 18% GST. All life saving procedures are free, basic and common surgeries like trauma cases have 5% GST. And sinful cosmetic and luxurious surgeries have 28%.

Now,  select the date. We have preferential and a dynamic price system for booking the date. Just like it existed while booking flight tickets 20 years ago. Pay higher fee for a better date.

Choose whom you want to be operated by. You'll find the list of surgeons on the app. The surgeon with the highest user ratings will be the costliest.

Select the chain of Hospital, location of Hospital, type of room, other facilities in the room. You can use coupon codes of new upcoming Hospitals to get discount.  Use code "GET50OFF". Offer valid till 60 days.

Various suture materials are listed, with advantage and disadvantage of each along with the cost. Select which suits you.

The size of the incision. No brainer that you'll have to pay more for smaller incisions.

After every 30 mins in the OT, the surgery will stop and 2 mins of advertisement will be shown. If you do not wish to see ads, please use the "paid version of the app".

Give video consent on the same.

(The patient selects as per his budget and his needs, weighing pros and cons of each aspect using terabytes of evidence based medicine to customise his surgery for him)

At the end, he hits "submit" button and an acknowledgement message appears.
        "Your order has been accepted. Our customer service representative will get in touch with you shortly. THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING WITH US"

Future of surgery

      It's 12.39 am and I'm trying to sleep. That's when all weird thoughts start coming to our minds. And I couldn't stop my brain from thinking about the surgery of the future. I don't know how did this thought come to my "Cosmo-cortical" pathway, but that was enough to fire some corticospinal neurons to direct my hand to pick up my phone and begin writing. 

       If we can manage to miniaturise the robots and teach them how to...

      Hey wait, it just occurred to me how did I begin thinking of this-

I had this doubt about- why the peritoneal cavity in females is open. I finally got the answer in embryology. That reminded me of what a sir in my college had commented about embryology, "embryology is not real. There's nothing like embryology. All what we are studying is abstract". That lead me to pondering over the fact that our embryology is limited to- explaining why the defects occur and the underlying basis of that anomaly. (How fascinating it is that we don't need to think of the whole sentence to think of that whole sentence that my sir had told. In a jiffy, I am reminded of all the words that my sir had told. I mean, to recall an entire day of your life, you don't need to spend that much time recalling it, it will take the same amount of time as you take to recall one word! That's just by the way). Then I started thinking of-if we would use knowledge of embryology to help people. Then it came to surgery while an embryo is still growing. But how can a human approach it? So I thought of robots. Microbots, the size of bacteria may be handy at that time. 

   After making giant leaps in the sphere of technology, we may one day be able to produce robots that have the capability of normal robots. Storing power, computing, operating, commanding, seeing, hearing, connecting and doing its job. 

     So imagine, a women is on the operation table half a globe away from me and a friend of mine just invents a new way to fight a disease. He codes it and instantaneously sends it which I forward to the master computer over there. It is then shared to the million Microbots all piled up in an injection. They are made to connect to the computer via wifi and download the lastest technique to fight the disease. They all also can talk to each other. When first one goes in the body, he may send a message to all others like- "oh it's dark in here. Oops I just got pushed into the right coronary artery. I ll do my work over there. Take care and good luck". The other Microbot may reply, I m having some difficulty in the 8th zone of the right lung. I need backup immediately". Robots will be carrying packets of drugs that can be injected selectively into each cytoplasm. They may be able to enter the nucleus, obtain copy of the main DNA via PCR and replace the mutated DNA with the new one. 

They all will work as a team. 

   That I think will be the future of surgery. :)