Posted on 01/22/2013 6:54:21 PM PST by Lorianne
•Hu Songwen built his machine after he could no longer afford hospital bills
•He said two of his friends had died after building and using similar machines
•Offered Government medical aid after story went national, but says nearest hospital is too far away and too crowded
Three times a week, Hu Songwen sits on a small toilet in his home in a rural east China town and fires up his homemade dialysis machine.
Hu, who suffers from kidney disease, made it from kitchen utensils and old medical instruments after he could no long afford hospital fees.
He was a college student when he was diagnosed in 1993 with kidney disease, which means waste products cannot be removed from his blood.
He underwent dialysis treatment in hospital but ran out of savings after six years. His solution was to create his own machine to slash his costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
China? They have socialized medicine... nice to see how well it’s working...
Ahhh the miracle of State run medicine. I hope his plans become public so we can print such a device out on our made in China 3D printer.
We will all likely soon be faced with the choice to make our own medical devices, or die.
They HAD to pick the red pill, hu?
You know, Americans used to be like that. Innovative, and rough and ready.
I'm a dialysis patient. Three days a week, I spend 3 1/2 hours in a dialysis chair hooked up to a machine that is circulating and cleansing my blood.
I understand that roughly 2/3 of all Medicare expenditures are in support of dialysis patients. I've reviewed my billing to Medicare and the supplemental insurance company and know much it costs to keep me alive.
The "problem" is that the treatments and associated surgery to maintain the access are very expensive ...but they will keep us alive for years...and years...and years.
For that reason, I've no doubt that -- once Obamacare fully kicks in -- we dialysis patients will be squarely in the sights of the federal bureaucrats.
A smart guy built this device. An American company could do the same but it would cost $100,000,000 to get the FDA approval to sell it. And they would pay the new Obama care medical device tax on every unit.
No, this cannot happen in the USA in 2013. Americans cannot make this product. Just plain cannot be done. And what an indictment is that on our government.
like doing dental work on yourself in the UK
when government healthcare comes to America, those 3D printers might come in handy
Something as simple as taking a daily dose of baking soda has been shown to greatly reduce the need for kidney dialysis. If one tries this it would be best to use aluminum free baking soda. I get good quality baking soda for baking on vitacost.com.
FWIW, I was amazed that they consider a 1-2 week project "long". I usually spent all summer working on my projects for the next school year.
And my 5th-grade granddaughter spent over six weeks on her award-winning AGW-busting project. (She had a full month of data from her own daily temperature measurements.)
Damn, humans are innovative!
It's hard to predict the progression of chronic renal failure, but nephrologists try to prepare patients for dialysis months in advance. One of the things they do is create a fistula between an artery and vein in the arm, where the blood is flowing directly from the artery to the vein. It takes a while for it to 'mature' to where it can be used for dialysis - the vein has to grow to handle that amount of blood flow.
They can stenose and have to be either opened up if possible or reattached progressively higher up the arm. And if they have nowhere else to go, they'll put in a graft or shunt from that artery back into the large brachiocephalic veins inside the thorax. Often these patients had renal failure due to vascular disease (#1 diabetes, #2 hypertension), so their vessels are at risk to begin with.
This Chinese man probably has a fistula that survived all these years and doesn't have that much difficulty hitting it.
Peritoneal dialysis is normally done at home. For that, the patient has a port put in their side, and they put several liters of dialysate fluid into their abdomen. It reaches equilibrium with the body fluids and is drawn off several hours later. It's done daily and the patient can walk around and do other things with it in, but they have to be careful to keep the port sterile (no open doors or windows to prevent blowing air particles, etc.) because getting an infection in their abdomen can easily end their ability to do dialysis this way. It's more easily tolerated because doing dialysis daily means smaller swings in the waste products in the body. A lot of the fatigue from dialysis isn't the total amount of waste product they have, but the big swings in the levels means the body is changing how it compensates in a short period of time.
Read the article. If you can.
bttt
just so everyone is clear, superglue and surgical glue are totally not the same thing.
if a person makes his own personal device fda approval ain’t required.
from the article it apears your kidneys still need to have some function. many dialysis patients have no function left.
As long as his solutions are mixed properly, he’s good to go. However, there’s a high risk of infection.
Should he be allowed all that equipment when younger people could use it? Or should he be told, “hey.... take a pill?”
Now there are two ways for dialysis to work. One is with the blood filtering machine and the tube in the arm.
The other is the tube into the intestinal cavity where a fluid is allowed to flow into the intestine area, then drained off several times a day. My mom used both till she passed away years ago.
Have you watched those third-world videos closely?
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