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posted by n1 on Saturday February 27 2016, @04:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the sales-executives-need-commission dept.

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?


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