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Using Sound Waves For Outpatient Neurosurgery
eldavojohn writes "Got a piece of malfunctioning brain tissue in your head? Want to avoid messy lobotomies and skull saws? Well, you're in luck; a study shows that acoustic waves can do the trick and will hopefully treat patients with disorders like Parkinson's disease. A specialist said, 'The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain — through the intact skull and skin — with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.' They focus beams on the part of the brain needing treatment and it absorbs the energy, which turns to heat. The temperature hits about 130 F, and they can burn 10 cubic millimeters at a time. Using an MRI to see areas of heat, they can watch the whole time and target only what needs to be burned. The study consisted of nine subjects suffering from chronic pain that did not subside with medication (normally they need to go in and destroy a small part of the thalamus on these patients). After the outpatient procedure, all nine reported immediate pain relief and none experienced neurological problems or other side effects after surgery."
Unless, of course, you have the regions overlap.
High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is different from the ultrasound used for diagnostic purposes, such as prenatal screening. Using a specialized device, high-intensity ultrasound beams are focused onto a small piece of diseased tissue, heating it up and destroying it.
this sounds like it could be a good video game!
130 F is right between rare and medium rare. I wonder what well done feels like.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You'd think that an outpatient procedure like this would be considerably cheaper than the traditional alternative. For a while the technology will be expensive, but the cost will come down, whereas the cost of human labor (i.e., of surgeons and nurses) will not. So in the long run, perhaps this is cheaper.
Could this be used on other parts of the body for cancer and such? Since the brain does not feel pain, you would have to use some kind anesthetic on other parts of the body.
whereas the cost of human labor (i.e., of surgeons and nurses) will not.
Eventually though it might. Eventually automated machines can take care of a lot of stuff. While surgeries might have to have more human intervention, eventually all minor procedures and general care-taking could be done via machine. So while for the foreseeable future you would need a human surgeon, in the two weeks you are in the hospital you might not need hardly any other people to take care of you.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You are logically correct. However, you would never get real people to go along with such a system because people quickly go illogical when their own lives, or the lives of loved ones are on the line. We are much more likely to have a healthcare system paid for by a preset percentage of the economy, the size of which will be quite large.
--why?
Actually I find the fact that we just go in there and destroy a relatively large part of the brain as the leading edge technology kind of amazing. The fact that it seems to work is even more amazing. But essentially this is a hammer, made to work on the opposite side of the wall. You still go in there and destroy whatever is there. Just weird to me that this is the cutting edge so far in brain surgery is all. Just goes to show how far we still have to go.
I concur. Chances are that this new kind of acoustic brain surgery will sooner be cheaper than a ticket to a Metallica concert.
Ezekiel 23:20
that I needed to keep the volume down on my headphones and not blast that garbage into my head. I guess one day they'll look around in my skull and find tissue cooked into a rude shape.
now to see if the cia put it in gun form.
I'm curious to know how they control the heat disippation. In fact, there are probably other invasive procedures involving burning away tissue with lasers as well, where I wonder how they protect surrounding tissue from the heat. It seems that in the brain in particular, some tissue would be susceptible to damage by high temperatures, even if that temp doesn't actually burn anything away.
Any ideas, Dr. Slashdot?
blood carries away heat, but not instantly.
if you can add the heat in 1/100 of a second, and it takes the blood a second to get rid of this heat...
McCoy and Crusher and Bashir never cut anybody open, they use... er, it looks like the technique from TFA. Communicators, flat screen computers, self-opening doors, etc. Now this.
Amazing. When do I get my matter replicator?
Free Martian Whores!
Darn, the tin foil in my hat won't work against this! I'm going to have to add some sound-absorbing cotton wool too in order to keep the CIA out of my head!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Could this technique be used for people who are super morbidly obese to kill of the section of their brain than gives them an appetite? I mean they would still have to eat, but they would have to make eating a routine like brushing your teeth, etc...
Or would there be issues getting them to FIT into a MRI to do the procedure in the first place. I see a future where fatties are put into the MRI for 30 minutes until parts of their brains reach 130 degrees and they loose their appetites.
Of course me being a fattie, I wouldn't mind having a part of my brain scotched if it could kill off my ravenous appetite.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
and now my ice cream thinks trees are precisely why shoe laces bark the 1812 overture spatula rice mommy.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Sorry but this comment is just a whole bunch of fail -- first of all, neither you nor I know how this process works. First off, you are complaining about the deficiencies of something we have never been able to do before? You do realize that the alternative is cutting open your skull and digging around in your brain, right? And then it never states in the article that the size is fixed at 10mm3 (although it very well might be) and even if it is, I am fairly certain that they would have figured out a way around this deficiency, like, you know, overlapping treatment regions or something?
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Now they won't laugh anymore when I tell them I have noises in my head
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
'The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain â" through the intact skull and skin â" with extreme precision and accuracy and safety.'
Something about the word "lesions" doesn't quite make me think "safety". Reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where Jim Carey's character asks if there is any risk of brain damage and the guy tells him that "technically, it is brain damage".
don't worry, the tinfoil should block the acoustic waves
They already use it on some other tumors--I think some uterine tumors, for example. This version is for the brain and has some particular tricky problems associated with it, notably that the skull can absorb sound waves and its density varies--kind of like how when you build a nuke you need to focus the shock waves right, through solid materials of different densities.
(Only on Slashdot could you simplify something by comparing it to building a nuke)
I concur. Chances are that this new kind of acoustic brain surgery will sooner be cheaper than a ticket to a Metallica concert.
Which is appropiate, since both have the potential to damage your brain
No sig for the moment.
But in America, bigger is better, and 130 is clearly bigger than 54...
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
For a while the technology will be expensive, but the cost will come down, whereas the cost of human labor (i.e., of surgeons and nurses) will not. So in the long run, perhaps this is cheaper.
I suspect that sometime in the near future (10 to 25 years), that most surgeries will not involve a human being for the operation itself.
For all its worth, I suspect America will never political solve the problem with Universal Healthcare, but technology will eventually fill in the gap.
At the cost of how many lives in the meantime until that day...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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It's not our fault that you have no respect for history! Why, every American learns the maximum temperature in Farenheit's lab by heart. Even the ones who can't spell know what 100 degrees are!
See, we have a secret plan to memorize all trivia by using weird units.
Try taking ethics. If we followed your slippery slope logic we'd start killing people when they hit retirement age. After all, they'll never again go back to work and 'pay back' their value after they start collecting social security. Same for the mentally retarded, just drown them right?
"Realistically we need to start realizing that not every person DESERVES the best treatment". And who decides that?
New procedures are always expensive, do you think the first x-ray machines were worth the cost to say "yup, you got a broken leg son". Now they are standard practice.
"so costly that society can never regain that investment". Public education is costly, if a kid isn't learning and behaving by second grade should society perform a retroactive abortion? After all without an education they'll just be a burden on society, and its not worth paying for the education if they aren't being productive, why not save the money for the other years of school?
Did you have a 4.0 GPA in school? what about college? How much are you contributing to society now? I'm not so sure I am getting back my investment in you. Most of the education system in the world are funded by tax dollars.
What about no child left behind? Why don't we get real efficient and just let them starve? They'll never pay enough in taxes to 'regain investment'.
Would be nice if they could use this to destroy the two pinpoint spots of brain damage my girlfriend has that cause her epilepsy. She's afraid of surgery (doesn't want her skull opened up, and who can really blame her?) but she would be one to try something like this in a heartbeat.
if a kid isn't learning and behaving by second grade should society perform a retroactive abortion?
I would have been dead long before second grade were that the case.
Actually, as a researcher in the field, controlling cost is one of the motivations behind this method.
Do you have any idea how much open brain surgery costs? It's several days in the hospital, plus a team of surgeons, plus an operating room. All in all, from $50,000 to $200,000. High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) doesn't need any of that. There are hopes this could almost be an outpatient type of procedure.
One my childhood friends suffered from epilepsy for many years until as a teenager, he had exploratory brain surgery (in 1988) where they removed a cubic centimeter of diseased tissue. He was in the hospital for a week.
Not every new idea in medicine costs more money.
Blondes are only dumb because bleach causes brain damage. So I think this technique may be applicable...
Q-BTW, how can you tell if a blond has been using your computer?
A-There's whiteout on the screen.
Q-How many blondes does it take to change a lightbulb?
A-None, some horney man will change it for her.
Q-How many blond feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A-THAT'S NOT FUNNY YOU FUCKING PIG!
Q- Why was the parent post modded "offtopic"?
A- The moderator was blonde!
Free Martian Whores!
Indeed, there are thousands of tiny blood vessels in the retina, and lasers are used to weld torn retinas back together; I've undergone the procedure. I'd post another link to a journal entry about my vitrectomy (the retina finally detached) but a) I already did and it would be redundant and b) the link I posted freaked a guy out too much.
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What springs to mind first is the terrible potential to abuse this technology on political prisoners, criminals, etc.
Depending on how well you pinpoint certain areas of the brain, but I wonder if you can permanently destroy a person's effectiveness at whatever skills the government doesn't want them pursuing. It sounds like this procedure doesn't leave any external evidence, and the internal lesion may not be readily identifiable without biopsy.
"We will release you to your family immediately, but only if you consent to this minor procedure...."
Wasn't this in an episode of The Prisoner? That show was way before its time.
I'm pretty sure this technique is already in daily use. From what I can tell, it involves rap, subwoofers, and the patient driving by my house at 11:30 p.m.
I didn't exactly find where they said the cost of this was but it is a Swiss study so they could be off a little compared to other countries.
However, you are coming to the wrong conclusions. You are only measuring income disparagement between having and not having the procedure and coming to an arbitrary conclusion. However, this is wrong on so many levels as I can show that a poor person making minimum wage according to your criteria would never be eligable for most major procedures where a high level exec or a millionair who inherited their money might more easily slide through. The differences between making minimum wage and the minimum plus $1-4 dollars or even minimum wage on a reduced workweek compared to a full work weak would have severe problems justifying the costly procedures where someone making 500k a year could earn 750k a year would justify the expenses more readily.
But when you look at the full aspects of human life, you have to consider what the person can't do because of the illness or injury. For instance, what kind of price tag would you put on having to open your home up to outside people to come in an clean it because you can't? What kind of price do you put on needing someone to help bath because you can't bend certain ways without knee bending agony? What kind of price can you place on not being able pick up or to hold your own kids or grandchildren. How about not being able to go outside and playing with them, not smelling their hair and giving them the love and nurturing that they deserve and humans families normally aspire to because of some limitation your disease or illness presents. How about having to give up hobbies and activities that you always found enjoyable or having to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in order to still participate. You may think it doesn't matter now, but wait until you are afflicted with something and you are told to just suffer because you don't add enough value to society.
The problem with your line of reasoning is that you assume or expect a gain but don't rationally look the realities. Costs of equipment is one reasons these procedures are so expensive but that works out to be less per patient if you treat more patients. So if you have the equiptment and treat 10 people, it may cost 100,000 per treatment but if you treat 100 people, that drops to 10,000 per treatment. If it's realistic to treat 5 patients a day 5 days a week, then that cost of equipment drops to just 3800 per patient. Now if you pay for a portion of that million dollar piece of equiptment with fund arrived from people who aren't being treated (profits from another division or charity or insurance or taxes) then it can be even lower. That 3800 could become16-1700 if the 91 million tax payers paid just .6 cents more per year in taxes. Now don't read that wrong, it isn't 60 cents, it is six tenths of one cent.
But, that doesn't even address why the prices of the machine is high to begin with. Or why the costs of the tech and doctor is so expensive. Get those trimmed down, and that 6/10ths of one cent could be less then one tenth of one cent. Anyways, the point is that if the machines exist, then the more they are used, the less it costs per treatment. Your withholding treatment because someone isn't worthy plan would only result in increased costs and less people qualifying.
C'mon, America. Catch up with the world's weights and measures. ;-D
Well, we may be behind in measures, but our fatasses have your weights beat by a mile!
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Well, it'll get cheaper until we finally hit that impending shortage of helium (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html) - you know, that situation where virtually all of the helium in the world comes from one deposit in Texas, and the well's running dry. It's also, at the moment, completely unrecoverable, as when it gasifies and escapes, it simply floats to the farthest reaches of the atmosphere.
When that happens, the price of performing MRI will skyrocket. MRI needs superconducting electromagnets, and when helium (and thus liquid helium) goes, superconductors go too.
So, until we get metallic, or at least, non-ceramic, high-k superconductors, or find a way to recover or synthesize helium (Hi, hydrogen fusion!) ... this, and most other NMR-based technologies, are just going to get more expensive.
As someone who lives with chronic pain, let me say you are so far off the mark.
I do respond to medication, but the only pain-killers that work are very heavy - Fentanyl.
I haven't had a full time job for many years. I never will without advances in the treatment of pain. If a procedure like this may mean I can work again, and pay taxes. Then I can afford expensive medical insurance.
More importantly, my kids then have a Dad who works full-time. They see that working leads to reward. They see that working hard at school can lead to a better life. At the moment my 16 y.o. sees no point in trying, as life can throw a curve ball and fuck you over. So if I could get something closer to a "normal" life, my kids will see me modelling better work-ethics and will be more likely to emulate my success. They see there's a point to trying to achieve their level of personal excellence, earn more money, pay more taxes and have more productive and potentially happier lives.
That's 6 people now pay more taxes.
Now I'm a maths teacher by vocation. If I was able to teach full-time I would be able to show several hundred kids a year that maths is easy, maths is fun, and that they can use it to solve real problems in everyday life. A few of these kids will go on to do amazing things, just because I can do what I am good at doing, and I can do it well. Over say 20 years there would be a significant number of people who have happier lives, earn more money and pay more taxes.
That's say 300 people now pay more taxes.
It's been shown in the literature that children of professionals are significantly more likely to undergo tertiary study and become professionals. So the children of the kids that were inspired to greatness by having a great teacher are more likely to have happier, more productive lives with higher paying jobs.
So there are potentially thousands of people who are paying more taxes, who are making great discoveries, and are generally happier, just because my pain is better managed without putting knives inside my head.
Look past the short-term benefits to the individual, and look at the potential returns to society and humanity as a whole, and the pay-off of a (admittedly) expensive procedure becomes enormous. And the return to the individual who suffers otherwise incurable chronic pain is not something measured in $$. To not wake up crying because I didn't die in my sleep would bloody marvellous. It's the possibility that there will be advances that help me that has kept me from suicide, and I'm not Robinson Crusoe.
What about every child left behind?
FIFY
I don't think so. This treatment should be on the order of thousands of dollars, versus tens out thousands of dollars for brain surgery or repeated radiation treatments. Plus, there should be much, much fewer side effects. Also, many disorders of the type they're interested in treating with this technique affect young people whose lifetime incomes will dwarf the costs of successful treatments.
It does happen, it has happened. It should not be condoned.
But don't they price these machines like this? As in, without this machine, it generally costs about X to deal with the problem (all inclusive), and this machine will deal with the problem faster and safer, therefore we will charge an amount so it will cost say X + 10%.
For medical equipment, the triangle must be: faster, cheaper, safer. Pick One or Two.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That's why I mentioned it. This new technology seems to be doing exactly the same as the old one, only this time with precision instruments.
Ezekiel 23:20
Wow, I'm so glad we don't do this. I was a second grade dropout for awhile and would have been targeted. Seriously. My teacher (Mrs. Demperio) hated kids, especially hated boys, and plain despised me. She'd make fun of me in front of the class, give me extra work just to keep me busy, etc. I decided I wanted to drop out and my parents didn't force me back into school for a bit. (They went to the principal but he kept insisting that she was his best teacher and wouldn't listen to the stories of what she was doing.) Mrs. Demperio also told me that I'd never be a success in life. A few years later, I returned to the school to rub it into her face that I was doing well in school (honors classes and the like). Wouldn't you know it, she had retired and moved to Florida the previous year!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
no it DOESN'T! what you need is some earplugs, that 'll keep those acoustic waves out of your head.
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the Netherlands is where Dutchies live
Q: "But don't they price these machines like this? As in, without this machine, it generally costs about X to deal with the problem (all inclusive), and this machine will deal with the problem faster and safer, therefore we will charge an amount so it will cost say X + 10%." A: "No." Q: "'No,' you say?? But... how...??" A: "They divide the total cost of the machine during it's live, and then divide that by the expected number of patients it will treat, and use that as a starting point for the price"
No, that's how hospitals decide how much to charge individual patients for procedures using the machine.
I was talking about how the machine manufacturer decides how much to charge the hospital for the machine.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
326K is bigger than 130F
and a degree Celcius or Kelvin is a waaay bigger difference than a degree Fahrenheit, so Celvius degrees are bigger, stronger, and more powerful than you weak empire units! hah!
so you thing cutting open a skull and tying the pieces back together with pieces of strings is NOT messier than just destroying the tumor without any skull saws?
I don`t get where this meme is coming from. Ive seen it mentioned lots of places...the kooky idea that robots and computer software will soon be doing SURGERY.
Out of all the jobs on this planet, surgery is going to be one of the last ones replaced by automation. Nearly every other form of employment is easier to automate. Surgery is a series of delicate, deliberately chosen steps that requires an enormous pool of knowledge and experience to do successfully. Surgeons go through more years of training than any other job on the planet. The actual physical motions and dexterity have little to do with what makes it difficult : as the Dean of my medical school said, surgery is about knowing when to operate, not doing the procedure itself.
Yes, telepresence bots are used to hold some of the instruments...but that in no way even slightly reduces the need for an educated professional at the controls of the robot.
Uh, you can use liquid hydrogen, which is in unlimited supply. Only reason they use helium is that it gets slightly colder and that it is slightly safer. MRIs using liquid hydrogen will need a more robust emergency ventilation system to get the explosive gas out of the building safely (maybe theyll put them in freestanding structures next to hospitals) but will work as normal.
Congratulations, in an effort to extol a virtue of socialized medicine you beautifully summarized why it is desperately wrong on a human level.
I hope you never have the experience of a bureaucrat telling you that your life is not worth saving.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
That example only works if you have socialized health care - and it actually is employed to some extent in countries which have single-tier government controlled health care. Here in Canada we don't kill off old people, we just make sure that the surgery they need is scheduled for, say, 3 years down the road. Since they can't seek medical attention privately in Canada, many of them end up going to the US and paying for their treatment out of pocket. I'm not sure what we'll do once Obama turns your medical system into a socialist paradise. Probably travel to Cuba, instead.
they're using Britney Spears waves to create the lesions.
Also, we now know what makes the RIAA people brain dead.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -Gandhi
That's how they initially price it. Then another manufacturer comes along and charges X - 10%, then the first lowers their price, then they eventually approach Y, the cost of making the machine. Then someone else discovers how to do it cheaper and lowers the price further than competitors can to gain an advantage, and the price drops some more...
At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Works pretty well in tech., not sure if it's the same in medicine.
speaking as some one in a coronary care unit, I had a heart attack on saturday, the monitor I'm hooked up to automatically takes my blood pressure every hour can be more or less. Obviously this saves the nurses time and reduces costs.
Surprisingly I'm feeling quite well having a tube called a stent put in my artery has made me feel better than in months. Thats another great procedure developed in 1977 a sheath was inserted in my femoral artery
and some dye pumped in to show my damaged heart. It only took a few minutes to slide the stent (its kind of like the braiding on a coaxal cable up into place and then expanded with a small balloon, just a local anesthetic in my groin and less than 45 minutes to do the procedure.
I'm pretty lucky really since I called an ambulance fairly quickly after I started to get symptoms. Best description I can give is it felt like after some of the races i ran as a kid chest burning couldnt get breath despite breathing ok I wasn't getting the oxygen in. I was given an injection which unblocked the artery and saved much of my heart muscle from dying (that starts 20 minutes after the blood flow stops).
I really want to thank the Dr's and Nurses who saved my life this weekend (Mercy hospital Cork).
I know many of us here are overweight and not in the best health and probably don't realise it. If I had delayed I'd most likely be dead now, heart attacks can be fairly slow, i'd probably have waited thinking it'd wear off , that would have caused even more damage. Thankfully irelands health service is pretty terrific.
Hopefully if anyone finds similar symptoms they will remember this and not delay. :)
I'm really glad to be alive , and its pretty cool to have a netbook and a 3g modem with me running ubuntu of course
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
And I hope that you never have the experience of a clinic clerk telling you that all your savings and possessions are not worth enough to save your life.
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I can't wait until the neurologist can ROCK my ailments away.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
"During traditional surgery for Parkinson's, for example, the neurosurgeon stimulates the target area with the electrode to make sure he or she has identified the piece of the brain responsible for the patient's motor problems, and then kills that piece of tissue."
I got my PhD in psychology, but the work was done in the Center for Parkinson's Research in the chemistry department. At NIH I worked for a guy that did lots of studies on Parky's, and he loaned me out to other labs doing Parky's work to help develop new data collection and analysis techniques. I did work for a review paper on Parky's research and treatment techniques when I was with the psychiatry department at Yale Medical School. I've worked in surgery doing intra-operative neural monitoring -- I don't hold a knife, but I do hold that probe, test the target areas, and tell the surgeon where he can and can't cut. I know my way around a brain and a good bit about Parky's. That's not to ring my own bell, but is a set up for my response to TFA.
I've never heard of surgery for Parky's. If someone said they were going to have it I'd convince them not to. If a surgeon said they were going to do it, I'd offer to smack his hands. There are so many other things that can be done that it's foolish to kill off perfectly functioning brain tissue (motor area or thalamic circuitry feeding it) just because the circuitry that suppresses all but the desired actions (dopamine carrying inhibitory innervation) is running low on power because its source (substantia nigra) is itself dying off. Quite often the problem resolves itself because the various uninhibited signals wear themselves out fighting against each other, and some motor control can be retained. But if you kill the circuitry, it can't possibly be recovered.
When motor activity must be brought down due to disinhibition allowing random activity to become harmful, you can always do cryo-ablation of the nerve trunk coming off the spinal cord, killing off a small portion of it temporarily. It lasts around 18 months. You can redo it then if the problem returns, or let it recover if not. This is done as outpatient treatment in clinics by anesthesiologists all over, for chronic pain and such. Doing it to motor nerves differs not one iota in principle.
There's plenty of other alternatives, some approved by cross over for treatment of other symptoms, such as hydergine + nootropil conjunct (approved to delay or prevent dementia; helps sensitize the cortex to a lower level of dopamine), and high dose gabapentin to make those neurons that receive the dopamine signal and control cortical pyramidal cell circuitry to make them more effective.
If I ever run across a surgeon that wants to ablate some cortex or otherwise kill off brain tissue to treat a chemically based control signal failure, I'm going to attempt to alter his consciousness on the subject with an experimental technique of my own: corrective phrenology.
For the unlearned, phrenology is the discredited technique of reading the bumps in the various regions on one's head to determine the greater or lesser contributions from those areas to one's collective make up. Corrective phrenology is applying kinetic energy in the form of a good whack in order to change the size of the bumps and so the relative contributions of the areas this is applied to. The technique is discredited because nobody ever proved what areas do what, although we know that applies to the brain. So my technique would be experimental in that I'd have to give a good many whacks in various places to see what accomplishes the job. I'm thinking a Craftsman five pound ball peen cranial impact probe would be an appropriate tool.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Which of those two is preferable? The outcome is presumably the same.
The difference is this: in a socialist medical system your hope ends there. In an open market there exist hospitals and doctors that do charitable work. In a socialized medical world doctors do what the big scary government tells them to do and nothing more.
If the government wants to help people get medical coverage, here's the solution:
1. Cap lawsuit damages on malpractice suits. These outrageous settlements continue to drive up the cost of health care for everyone as doctors are forced to pay higher and higher malpractice premiums.
2. Kill off Medicare, Medicaid, and all of the other government managed health care programs and replace them with a simple voucher system for eligible citizens. If people can't afford medical insurance, the government can offer a credit voucher so the consumer gets to choose their coverage. Let the providers compete with each other and not the government and I guarantee you will be shocked at how affordable and excellent insurance suddenly becomes.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I know this can be beneficial, but this is too close to ice pick lobotomies for comfort.
And this seems like it is ripe for abuse by totalitarian states.
Creed and Linkin Park have been performing live lobotomies for years.
I record my sleeptalking
Explains the people you see with extremely load sound systems in their cars ... inadvertantly burnt out pieces of their brains!
Oh, I'm sure they will involve at least one human into the foreseeable future...
the manufacturer MAKES the machine, so they kinda know how much it cost them to develop... It costs a lot: first you need people who do a lot of theoretical work, then you need to develop a lot of new materials (for better scintillators, photomultipliers, magnetic coils, ...), then you need to actually produce these things, with all these state-of-the-art materials that you just invented...
Most procedures in US medicine are obscenely over-compensated. This is why we have the highest cost (and lowest quality) health care in the developed world.
One recent example... A friend had a ski accident and needed an MRI scan of her spine. In France cost Euro 300. In the US this would cost $ thousands.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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Metallica early 80's: "Death to false metal! Metal up the ass!"
Metallica 90's: "We're not a metal band"