This showed up on my FB feed the other day; it raises a very good point.
Maori.Geek writes a very good post on something I never considered before. Why are these essentially simple machines so very expensive?
Name a technology that is more useful, more educational, more interesting, and more overpriced than a[n] ultrasound machine. You can look inside of living things without the need for a[sic] powerful magnets or radioactivity and it is basically made from a speaker and microphone outputting to a screen.
Why doesn't every high school biology class room have an ultrasound to show how muscles work, and hearts beat? Why don't doctors have them immediately handy like a stethoscope or thermometer? Why can I not get one just because I am interested in how my injuries are healing? Probably because "a £20,000 [$30,000USD] scanner is generally classed as low cost."
After I spent $200 on a doctor's visit because of an injured foot, where they used a cabinet sizes[sic] ultrasound machine that looked like a 1950’s TV, I wondered how much it would cost to purchase an ultrasound for myself. After a[sic] finding that a "cheap" ultrasound is still $8000, I just couldn’t reconcile the cost with the technology and the simplicity and usefulness of such a tool. So I decided to do a little research.
After seeing one in person regularly over the last 9 months it struck a nerve; how useful would it be to have an ultrasound machine available at every doctor's surgery? Or in every bio-lab at high school?
(Score: 1) by dr_barnowl on Sunday February 28 2016, @10:56AM
Veterinary ultrasound units are MUCH cheaper.
You can get a veterinary US for less than £1,000. I had one of these units on my desk at one point because a well-known abortion clinic in the UK was wanting to use it to check that they'd finished the abortions properly - so I had to figure out the proprietary serial protocol it used to download images to a computer.
We all had a good play with it - maybe the image quality wasn't up to the standard of the medical units, and the software was definitely quite primitive, but I'm sure the vast majority of the hardware was exactly the same as medical-certified units that cost 10x the price.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/231650995998?adgroupid=13585920426&hlpht=true&hlpv=2&rlsatarget=pla-131843261346&adtype=pla&ff3=1&lpid=122&poi=&ul_noapp=true&limghlpsr=true&googleloc=9046564&device=c&chn=ps&campaignid=207297426&crdt=0&ff12=67&ff11=ICEP3.0.0-L&ff14=122&viphx=1&ops=true&ff13=80 [ebay.co.uk]
I'm guessing the sole reason the medical units are expensive is because regulation means that they don't have sufficient competition.