I am stricken with a stuffy nose and post-nasal drip. This happens to me a lot.
In lieu of sleeping, I got to thinking about we might treat the
common cold, in the distant future. What would be the ideal
treatment, given what we now know? Let us assume we do not discover
some panacea that wipes out all rhinoviruses.
Nowadays, you wake up feeling kind of stuffy, with a slight cough and
an irritated throat. What next? What I do is pretend there is nothing
wrong for a day, and then I resort to saline solutions to irrigate
the sinuses (which are dry) and decongestants. As far as I can tell,
this does nothing to cure the problem but it alleviates the symptoms.
As they say, with the best treatment you can cure a cold in about 7
days, whereas if you leave it alone it gets better in a week.
In the distant future . . . You wake up feeling kind of stuffy, not
even at the irritation phase, but you take no chances. You call in
the robot nurse-practitioner. No visits to the doctor or drug store
where you might infect someone else. No waiting. The robot arrives in
an self-driving automobile/mobile lab 15-minutes later.
The robot comes into your house, checks your vital signs, and takes a
swab from your nose. It puts the sample in a DNA analysis machine and
determines that you do have a cold. It genotypes the virus, reports
back to the CDC main computer, and downloads instructions and
cautions. If it is a dangerous virus or an unknown, unrecognizable
type, it calls an ambulance which takes you to a human doctor. That
hardly ever happens.
What usually happens is the robot selects a vaccine targeting the
particular strain of virus you are infected with. Or, perhaps, in the
more distant future, it does on-the-spot recombinant splicing and
gins up exactly what you need. It give you a shot (or topical swab,
or whatever works). It gives you a 1-day supply of decongestant
pills, 2 liters of orange juice, and it suggest you get some bed
rest. (Or in a more authoritarian society, it orders you not to go
out of the house or infect anyone else, and assigns a small watchdog
robot to record who you come in contact with.)
You take it easy, wake up the next morning, and cold is gone.
Treatment like this might be available today -- I wouldn't know. But
I expect this would cost thousands of dollars and probably days of
effort to identify the virus, with human-labor intense methods. By
the time you did this, the cold will get better on its own. In the
scenario I envision the whole job is done in 15 minutes by a robot,
and it costs effectively nothing.
- Jed
