When you have been a kid were you scared of
needles? Were you scared of going and seeing a doctor because of pain then medicine is injected?
Well this pain is the past. You won't need to worry about your kids as they
simply won't feel it! And it is not because their pain genes will be changed
but due to physics stepping into medicine. In the nearby future drugs will be
injected without a pain at all. How will they do this? It is extremely hard to
believe but lasers will be used for this reason. You may think that lasers will
burn a hole in you to inject medicine, but this is not so straight forward. Anyway
mechanism actually is not too hard. To form 150 millionths of a meter, just slightly
thicker than a hair, diameter jets of drugs a micronozzle is used. It is
attached to the water chamber by a flexible membrane. Process starts when laser
heats water which vaporises so the pressure builds up as water vapor needs more
space compared than it is in liquid phase. After pressure reaches a certain
value, flexible membrane is pushed into the micronozzle. This happens so
quickly that drugs are pushed out with a very big velocity. Due to speed and
thickness jets passes through the protective layer of skin. Depending on the power
of the laser everything changes: the time how quickly water is vaporized, speed
of the jet of drugs and its penetration depth in the skin. Scientists had to
overcome a lot of challenges to get proper results. They had to choose laser
with right energy, duration of the laser pulse, diameter of the nozzle and
hundreds of other parameters to make this perfect for use. For example diameter
of the nozzle should be as small as possible to make penetration easier. At the
same time if it is too thin there will occur some unwanted effects. Sadly
this won't be applied for taking blood as it requires a constant withdrawal and
this new method helps only for single injections. Hopefully in the future
giving blood will become easy as these shots of medicine and everyone will
donate it. This could make possible to heal everyone who got into any kind of
accident, lost a lot of blood and prevent a lot of deaths.
