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The DIY Dialysis Machine
Millie Kelly was born with a condition that required an immediate operation. During this operation her kidneys started to fail and since she was too small for dialysis machines, doctors told her parents that she was unlikely to live. Luckily for Millie, Dr. Malcolm Coulthard and a colleague tried to build a much smaller kidney machine on their own and they were successful. Her mother said, "It was a green metal box with a few paint marks on it with quite a few wires coming out of it into my daughter - it didn't look like a normal NHS one." The girl was hooked up to the machine over a seven day period to allow her kidneys to recover. Two years later, her mother Rebecca says she is "fit as a fiddle." You should see what Dr. Coulthard can build using a postage stamp, a tuning fork, a lawn chair and a jellyfish.
Don't put pictures with stories unless you're going to take being a news organization seriously, with you know, editing and responsibility.
Sadly, this would have never happened in the US. The malpractice liability would be too great.
The picture of the patient is nice and all but the interesting part is the machine, right? I'd like a clear picture of that instead ...
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
I have mod points, but I would rather say something.
That is a beautiful woman with a happy, healthy child child. Get out of your make-believe Hollywood world and into the real one. I for one, saw the picture and thought it was sweet.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Not only was the summary bad, TFA was bad as well. Why couldn't a conventional dialysis machine be used? It doesn't say.
Is there a doctor in the house?
Probably not enough blood in the patient.
Using a dialysis machine means taking a fair amount of blood out of the body, running it through a bunch of tubes, and putting it back.
This effectively adds a lot of extra volume to the blood system as a whole. Adults can spare some without effect, but children and babies are much smaller, and so you have to have a much smaller device which doesn't have as much volume in it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is a great story and its sad how people are making rude comments about the mom. If you had a dying child, you were helpless and couldn't do anything to help save the child, you'd be like that too. So, please be a bit more sensitive about others. Regardless, this is something that can save the life of these insensitive people's children too if needed (if they are able to reproduce in the first place!) Give the guy some credit doing the best as a doctor to save a life.
It's going to our emergency rooms. All the people without decent health insurance are forced to rely on emergency room care for medical issues that could be handled, at a vastly lower cost, by a general practitioner. Also, they tend to let what start out as minor medical issues progress far longer because they can't afford to get them treated until an emergency room would deem it bad enough to deal with. That's the hidden reason why socialized healthcare ends up saving money overall, you get to take advantage of preventative medicine and catch issues early before the cost to treat them skyrockets.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
You're absolutely right. EMTALA essentially created universal healthcare in the US by making it illegal for an emergency room to refuse to treat someone based on their ability to pay. This is (in my opinion) a worthwhile goal, but one which is terribly inefficient with health-care money if not backed by a socialized healthcare system at the same time.
If you've got no healthcare, but get sick, you can roll into the ER for free treatment. Of course, ER care is an order of magnitude more costly than care from a family doctor, and does not include checkups, history, or preventative care that could have avoided the issue in the first place. It also requires that you wait until your condition is far enough gone that it constitutes an emergency, likely making things more difficult and expensive to treat.
So we pay for healthcare for everybody, except we do it as inefficiently as possible, tying up ER doctors, nurses and facilities with things that should have been taken care of at a tenth the cost elsewhere, earlier, and without occupying a bed somewhere at a facility designed for broken bones and heart attacks, not festering infections you should have had cleaned up a year ago.