Intensive Care Medicine, by its very nature, has been both technology-reliant and datarich as a specialty from its inception. Born amid a public health crisis, practitioners in this area have often been forced to innovate in desperate circumstances, developing and adopting emerging technologies that are now taken for granted, to manage severely disordered body systems and evaluate the effectiveness of therapies in real-time at the bedside. Amidst the ubiquity of Intensive Care support in modern hospitals, it is hard to remember that as a specialty, it is not even a century old. Its history is a litany of disruptors incorporating technology into clinical practice in unconventional ways. Back in 1952, with Copenhagen in the grip of a polio epidemic and paralysis of the breathing muscles a death sentence, Bjorn Ibsen decided to administer positive pressure ventilation through a plastic tube into the windpipe of a dying 12-year-old outside of an operating room environment. She recovered, and the hospital went on to replicate this practice for paralyzed polio patients across specially designated wards, mortality dropped from over 87 percent to under 15 percent and a new medical specialty was born. The desire to figure out whether the ventilator was working effectively triggered the re-exploration of gas laws, applied thermodynamics and electrochemistry from the 17th to 19th centuries using technologies developed around World War II and culminated in Severing Haus and Bradley’s development of the first blood gas machine, still on display at The Smithsonian. Blood gas analysis and interpretation, much to the chagrin of medical students everywhere, has since become integral to many areas of clinical practice outside the ICU! When Werner Forssman got himself expelled from medical practice in Berlin for having the temerity to run a long flexible tube up his arm veins to his heart despite prohibitions from his superiors (and then bragging about it in a me...Read more

In cosmetic medicine, regenerative treatments have the potential for transformative results. Many clinics opt for artificially induced methods to stimulate stem cell division, often using synthetic materials that can carry unpredictable risks. Dr. Hiroo Kuno, founder of Kuno Clinic, redefines what is possible in rejuvenation treatments. In 2007, he introduced ... Read more