The DIY Dialysis Machine 476
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.
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't put pictures with stories unless you're going to take being a news organization seriously, with you know, editing and responsibility.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, this would have never happened in the US. The malpractice liability would be too great.
Oh come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Show us the machine! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
That's we need for a legal system reform. Capping upper limit on malpractice lawsuits saves everyone money.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Caps would be great, but there is something fundamentally wrong with society if someone could sue the doctor when the child was going to die anyway.
In theory, there would be no standing to sue under the good samaritan laws.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory, there would be no standing to sue under the good samaritan laws.
Except for the fact that they are being paid to provide care, which means that the Good Samaritan laws don't apply.
See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "As a result, medical professionals are typically not protected by Good Samaritan laws when performing first aid in connection with their employment."
I still think they would be able to get away with it given the proper contracts, otherwise you wouldn't see other "last ditch" attempts.
STFU (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
We had tort reform for just such a thing here in Texas. Neither my insurance premiums nor healthcare costs have been reduced.
Re:hereditary (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh stuff it. At least this article doesn't say what the "condition" that required operation was; for all you know it could be something that is just a one-time occurrence, or at least that requires a one-time fix for each person.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugly guys shouldn't comment on appearance (Score:4, Insightful)
Hate to feed the trolls here.
Hate to break it to you but YOU are a troll.
But if you're going to post a picture, at least have it be of an medium attractive woman.
I always find it amazing that guys who are rather hideous themselves (Howard Stern I'm looking at you) seem to feel it is their job to criticize the appearance of women. It's especially comical here on a website devoted to nerd news where most of the readership wouldn't have any idea how to please a woman [google.com]. Here's a clue - no one cares what your ugly ass thinks of someone else's appearance. If you feel the need to criticize you had better be a model yourself. Given that you are posting here on Slashdot that's pretty unlikely - so kindly shut the hell up.
Re:STFU (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not that we don't care about the mother and daughter, it's just that it's the machine that made them remarkable. If that seems heartless, then you've overlooked the fact that kid would've died without it. I'm just saying it's worth a little more attention.
Re:A painful noisy chair in the mail? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:STFU (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweet or not, judging from the replies already here I'd say that if Slashdot starts posting photographs with each story the site will turn into half Flickbookbucket and half /b/ in short order.
Re:too big? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A painful noisy chair in the mail? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems like one should be able to combine treatment with a transfusion to get the volume needed for the machine to work without killing the patient. I think there has to be more to it than that.
Re:hereditary (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. If I do come by Digg occasionally, it's mostly to affirm that "Ah! This is why Slashdot is so much more fun to read these days!" And than I hurry back here. :-) This is even more true because I'm one of those people who mostly reads /. for the interesting, insightful and funny comments.
Get a grip people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hereditary (Score:4, Insightful)
First, not everything that causes a dependence upon medical science is perpetuated to subsequent generations. I lost my kidneys to a non-hereditary disease at 21 -- ten years before I had a child. Yes, I now have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of my life, at quite a bit of cost to my health insurance provider, and that sucks. But my daughter should be free of the problem I had, and so should her children and so on.
Second, those of you who argue "survival of the fittest!!!" should keep in mind that a better understanding of science -- including medical science -- may well imply "more fit", even if it *physically* weakens us. Considering that, so far at least, humanity is one of the more successful species on the planet despite the fact that 1) we are far weaker than many other animal species, 2) we are far slower than many other animal species, 3) we have fewer natural defensive weapons (teeth, claws, venom, etc.) than many other animal species, 4) we have much poorer senses than many other animal species (and so on), I would say that there is ample evidence in favor of this line of reasoning.
Two fallacies in one! (Score:1, Insightful)
You're aware that civilized people consider eugenics to be out of vogue, right?
Whether or not some group of people considers it to be "out of vogue" has little to do with whether or not it is a good idea (or valid observation, as in this case the poster wasn't actually advocating eugenics so much as observing the consequences of the current trend). Reasoning that the group must be right because it is a group is known as the "bandwagon fallacy."
Also, you are subtly implying that the poster is not civilized. Be that as it may...uncivilized people can still make correct statements. Rejecting an idea because of some attribute of the person who states it is known as the "ad hominem" fallacy.
But I suppose if a little irrational thinking allows you to post comments that make you feel superior, have at you!
Re:For that matter... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ugly guys shouldn't comment on appearance (Score:5, Insightful)
i had some pretty awful pizza last night but since i'm not a chef I can't really say anything about it.
Sure you can because the chef can do something about how he cooks. Bad cooking can be a mistake and can be corrected. But if you call someone ugly in public because they didn't win the genetic lottery THEN you are just an ass.
EMTALA (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Or... insurance isn't an idealized market. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps because it prevented an increase in premiums? Or it went into preventing a decrease (or an outright increase) in quality of care?
These possibilities are worth considering.
Or course, it's also quite likely that malpractice insurance companies, health care providers, and health insurers had little incentive to pass any savings on to those insured. An insurance marketplace isn't like some other basic marketplaces like, say, restaurants (if it were, we wouldn't eat out at the restaurant of our choice, we'd get subsidized meals at the company affiliated locations). Most of us don't chose our health plan on our own, and nobody really knows how good their plan is until they really, really need it -- and by that point, if there's a problem, you're going to have trouble getting someone else to cover you, so it's not easy to switch away from a poor alternative. Furthermore, choice at signup time is plagued by the problem of considerable information asymmetry -- the insurance companies most assuredly have an army of actuaries and lawyers and others to assess and manage the risk each potential new customer adds to the pool, but individual consumers don't have ready access to similarly significant information about insurers for comparison, and even where some sources exist, the time investment's pretty daunting. Market forces operate pretty weakly for the consumer, if at all.
So, two plausible scenarios:
1) Tort reform prevented cost increases, and resulted in more stable costs for consumers, but not price reductions
2) Tort reform prevented cost increases, and resulted in more stable or reduced costs for insurers, who kept extra as profits
Which is it? Either's fairly plausible; we'd probably have to see either stats on health care / insurance prices in texas, or have public balance sheets for insurers....
Re:Well, maybe, but (Score:5, Insightful)
"Problem is you're in England. You're stuck with socialized health care."
First, it's the United Kingdom, not England. Second, a national health service is not "socialised medicine". Socialised medicine is just perjorative spin used by heavy investors in healthcare to ensure that their profits remain uninterrupted. What the NHS is, is a national health service funded by tax contributions. Roads in the US are paid for by taxes. Does this mean you have a "socialised transport network"? Third, if you don't want to use the NHS, you can go private and be seen immediately, in the UK. There are plenty of private healthcare facilities along with various plans, insurance policies etc. Fourthly, the NHS appears to deliver higher quality treatment for a lower cost than in the US and for many conditions (eg, cancer) there is no waiting. Still, who cares about the health of a nation when shareholder value is booming? There is also no wrangling with insurance companies or having to remortgage your house or borrow vast amounts of money with little realistic hope of paying it back.
Having lived in countries with both a NHS and with entirely private healthcare, I can say from sore personal experience that I would take the NHS every time.