I have yet to come across a 3-D printer, much less used one.
Should the day ever come, I would love to be involved in the printing of organs. I'm seriously shaking just typing about the idea of being able to replace damaged body parts through manufactured materials. Joint replacements right now seem to be primarily steel, but could be synthetic bone and cartilage soon enough. Skin grafts are already being tested, especially since that's one of the least complex parts of our body to replicate. I dream of the day we don't require someone having died in order to replace a heart, or going so far as to pay for organ donations.
Just in dialysis alone, 3D printing could change medicine forever.
Obviously being able to create a functioning kidney is the ideal, but that bad boy has enzymatic production jobs as well as his job to filter. I'm pretty sure, between our mastery of filtration and our ability to provide patients with chemical balance through a machine, we're not too far from manufacturing tissue to do the same.
What if there was a way we could make a hemolytically stable graft flexible enough to move within the lower arm naturally, but easily repaired with new plastic through laproscopy? We already have a pretty strong tube now, but we often have to face the risk of rupture after years of dialysis access points wear it out. For now, that means putting in a new graft, usually in the opposite arm, and using that until it's worn with holes, etc etc. How great would it be to just surgically put the access in and maintain it?
What if 3D printing could make a graft piece that has two prominent sub-dermal injection points (like on an IV line), so we could more effectively use the button-hole procedure for access? God that would be great. Less risk of bleeding on removal, because the injection point would close itself after the needle's out, and faster healing each time since really all we're doing is breaking a thin layer of skin.
I'm only considering this half-cocked, so I'm sure there's details that will either help or prevent innovating something different, but I hold hope. Nothing makes me as sad as seeing aneurysms and surgical scars across the arms of people who have reached a point in their health that requires that much invasiveness.
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