White Paper

Taking Medicine in a New Direction

The Z-Axis

Matthew T. Kuhn · William A. Hendricks III, MD

For sixty years, the job of space medicine has been simple: keep the crew alive long enough to bring them home. As spaceflight opens to ordinary people, that will no longer be enough. We will have to practice real medicine off-world. And when we do, we may find that the absence of gravity is not only a hazard to manage but a tool we have never had: a missing axis that could change how medicine itself is practiced.