Pictured: Screencap from the 2009 Reboot Star Trek movie in which Dr. McCoy is giving Jim Kirk a hypospray in the back of the neck. He is not being gentle, as evidenced by Kirk’s pained expression.
[Caption: The iconic Hypospray, which uses air to inject patients instead of needles, is currently in development for real world use. The first was created in 1960, 6 years before TOS aired. It was a bulky device called the “Pedo-o-Jet”, referring to it’s use in pediatric care. Since then, the technology has become more and more developed as our understanding of medical science has advanced.]
Summary of the science under the cut. Please refer to sources for research done, especially if you want to dive in further.
The Ped-o-Jet was created by Aaron Ismach in 1960, 6 years before the original series aired on television, possibly giving us origins of the hypospray. However, the Ped-o-Jet was a very bulky item, resembling a heavy duty airbrush system, rather than the sleek traditional needle like look we see Dr. McCoy wielding against Captain Kirk. The Jet-injectors, as many tend to go by, made it possible to administer vaccines much faster than regular needle injections, and therefore, made it possible to eradicate Smallpox by 1977.
(pictured youths in Africa being injected with a smallpox vaccine using a Jet-Injector)
The way they work is, the injectors have a tank of air, usually nitrogen, that they use to open the pores to let the vaccine through into you veins. The upsides are that in terms of contamination, you don’t need needles, and it is less painful, however, it is quite uncomfortable. The downsides are that it is not completely free of contamination, there is still a chance that you can spread contaminants and infections from person to person if you use it on one person after another. Another downside is that in earlier models, you couldn’t extract blood/fluids, or anything without damaging the vein and harming the patients.
(Pictured: The Jet-Injector created by MIT researchers)
However, as our understanding of medical technology have improved far beyond what researchers and technicians believed in the past 50 decades, the Jet-Injectors have seen a massive improvement in how they work. Newer models are more compact and resemble what they look like in Star Trek. In the past decade alone we have seen a huge leap forward in terms of design, efficiency, and cost. A Professor and a few researchers at MIT have studied the technology and have designed prototypes that can inject and extract effectively without pain. Others at National Medical Products, inc, created a disposable J-Tip injector, and have demonstrated the use of their technology, though their injector makes a very loud popping noise when it releases air. And researchers from the University of California have created injectors that inject small amounts of powder vaccine into the veins over a period of 10 minutes.
Currently the Jet-Injectors are FDA approved and are used. The main problems are getting them to where they are effective and at a less expensive rate than the Traditional needles. However, there questions from the Medical Community on if this is truly going to revolutionize the industry, and to that I say, only time and research will tell.
