Slashdot Mirror
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.
Chewing gum was used, he's got nothing on Macgyver.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Sadly, this would have never happened in the US. The malpractice liability would be too great.
now i trust there will be a whole slashdot article category devoted to these girls? i, for one, welcome our new humanoid dialysis-building overlords.
Indeed, I SHOULD see that. What the hell DOES the good doctor make out of those things?!?
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.
Only if you count the baby. This idea that women gain ten pounds during pregnancy is a fallacy that was propogated, in part, by an early belief in the medical establishment that women needed to gain weight for a healthy pregnancy. Once that idea was disproven, fewer women forced themselves to gain weight during pregnancy.
In fact, most women only experience a mild increase in food intake while pregnant. My understanding is that it's more important to pay attention to sudden food cravings, as those are often signs of missing minerals and vitamins. (e.g. my wife wanted bananas while she was pregnant)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The doctors deserve to receive some sort of notice from whatever professional association they belong to, and also a Patent for the smaller size machine that they created. Thats some pretty amazing work - and they already have a human test trial to back it.
If you'd RFTA (but why should you be different?) you would have seen that the UK, just like the US, does indeed have miniature dialysis machines designed for children. However, this child -- weighing less than six pounds at birth -- was too small to use them. Not just the UK ones -- she was too small to use any existing dialysis machine anywhere in the world.
So, had this happened in the US, she would have been OK, just as long as she had a doctor who was willing to spend his own time and his own money inventing a new machine and building it himself in time to save her life.
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.
There might have been a minimum flow required to push blood across the cleaning medium. Given how small she was, she might not have had enough blood in her entire body to even use the larger machine.
An electrical analogy: Say you have electrons you want to flow from A to B. If you use a wire too thick in diameter all the current is going to go into resistance of the wire. This girl's current source wasn't powerful enough to drive electrons through the wire, so the doctor swapped in a thinner wire.
And since this is slashdot, a car analogy: Turbo chargers work by using exhaust air to spin a turbine which spins a compressor to compress incoming air. If you put a massive turbo on a small car, there wouldn't even be enough air to spin the blades. So you have to get a smaller turbine.
It was my experience when I became a vegetarian that paying attention to cravings was just good practice in general. Not necessarily caving in to them all the time, but to this day, if I'm really craving a bean burrito, I know I could probably use more protein.
...you should see what miracles occur when you're not oppressed by an onerous "single-payer" socialist-welfare-state "health" care system like the NHS.
Infant mortality rate in the US: 6.3 per 1,000 live births
Infant mortality rate in the UK: 4.9 per 1,000 live births
Personally, I'd rather not see the "miracle" of more dead babies.
It's got to take serious balls to whip something like this up and plug somebody's baby into it, even if the baby was going to die.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...you had better be a model yourself. Given that you are posting here on Slashdot that's pretty unlikely...
As a 26 year old model and C coder, and grandmother of three, I am offended by your comment.
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.