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The Next Generation of Medical Tools May Be Home-brewed
An anonymous reader writes: In the Little Devices Lab at MIT, Jose Gomez-Marquez builds medical tools using a DIY mindset. He's designing cheap alternatives to existing hospital equipment to help spread high-quality medical care around the world. Gomez-Marquez is at the forefront of a large and often-unrecognized group of DIY medical tool builders. Together they are challenging the idea that staying healthy requires extraordinarily expensive, sophisticated equipment built by massive corporations. Harnessing this inventive energy, he argues, could improve the health of thousands of people around the world.
A lot of tools in medicine are initially built as one offs, effectively home built. However, when dealing with medicine the controls are simply not good enough. When we build and test a medical device, it takes rigorous testing to know how it will interact with patients and other devices/ medicines. Home built devices simply are not consistent enough to be able to keep things within allowable guidelines. It is bad enough that unrelated symptoms get reported under current practices, but homebuilt would make it thousands of times worse. Even little differences like acrylic vs paper tape can lead to large repercussions and few are going to take on that liability.
Of course the party you either fail to appreciate, or dont want to mention is that the regulations are strongly supported by the incumbents.
It created a very artificially high gateway to entry for competitors, while the cost of maintaining it is well covered for the current manufacturers
who use it as a way to charge artificially high profit margins in the name of 'safety'. Many of the regulatory requirements have been actively
created BY the manufacturers..
This is of course how almost all of the medical industry operates, certainly not just the manufacturers.
The natural reaction to this is of course a black market in affordable 'medicine' for people who just cannot afford to take that ride. Unfortunately
the US has just taken the opposite tack by trying to 'spread the load' instead, continuing to fuel its insane medical inefficiencies, and to continue
to maximise profitability for medical related companies. What a surprise.
If you really think that top quality medicine costs that much, then I suggest you visit South Korea... Their private medical services are very high
grade, and cost much, much less. Their fault rates are also lower..
The fact is that a lot of diagnosis (and other) equipment is cheap to make these days, and is not directly a safety threat to patients. The medical
system however does not want large price drops in one area, as they are worried at all levels that it may tip the scales and their own gravy trains
may get tipped..
Well, we can complain about the FAA all we want, but I can't remember the last last time there was a serious airline wreck in the States.
I think that's a false association. You might just as well say "well, my anti-tiger rock seems to be working".
I've already noted that it's the aircraft manufacturers who ensure safety, at great expense and effort in addition to the certification process.
Considering the expense of certification and that it's largely needless, don't you think the expense and effort should be directed towards a more useful goal? At the least, don't you think the regs should be changed to encourage safety?
And from a completely economic perspective, since the cost of compliance is so high, are useful solutions which would make us safer being ignored because the price of entry is so high? (For the longest time there were no updated Cessna designs because they couldn't afford the certifications. The older designs went for *decades* without modern updated electronics.)
I complain about the FAA because their system is worthless. You support them because their pointless system hasn't caused an accident.
Your anti-tiger rock could be put to better use.
Too bad that MRIs don't cost $10 million. More like $1 million. That is a lot but they are very, very complex devices.
And yes, people care. And yes, there is graft, greed, avarice, blackjack and hookers but it's a pretty complicated problem. So complicated that even the vaunted European social democracies (the ones with the 'free' healthcare' are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to afford everything.
Blow into a paper bag for a while and quit hyperventilating.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!