Originally Posted by
philehidiot
I think Musk would probably have this tech himself if it didn't mean time off work to recover. We have this idea (promoted by doctors) that injury from surgery heals within 6 weeks. I can say this is unequivocally bollocks. There's chronic inflammation and some wounds don't heal for ages. There's always fatigue after a surgery like this and to think it could ever be "routine" with current medical technology is utterly insane. If we develop a way of completely eradicating micro-organisms from the surgical field whilst preserving human tissue, yeh, okay, maybe. But that isn't anywhere close.
In my field, we stick in pacemakers to stop people's hearts stopping. A pacemaker implant is second only to hip replacements in terms of cost effectiveness (i.e. how much money it saves over time Vs the cost of the treatment). So why don't we give one to everyone? Anyone can get cardiac conduction tissue fibrosis and end up dying of a heart stopping and a few grand is pretty cheap. We don't because of risk / benefit - you must determine that someone is going to benefit before exposing them to risk. If a pacemaker gets infected, the risk is life threatening and the same with a brain infection. The idea that this could be used recreationally is utterly insane for now. If he wants to develop a treatment for a specific medical condition then I'd be more than happy to see the results. I accepted the risk of paralysis for my surgeries (all three of them) but the condition they were treating was such that i had no life without it.
In medicine most treatments have levels of evidence attached to their indications. Class I is an indication where if you don't treat the patient, you're negligent. Class IIa is "yeah, you should do this but there are reasons not to", IIb is "maybe, made not, some evidence but not definitive but likely beneficial on balance" and III is "don't do that" and where the risks outweigh the benefits. If you throw in a pacemaker for a class III indication, you're likely to get sued if the patient realises. The evidence for doing this kind of Musk stuff isn't even class III. it's non existent. We know the risks, we don't know of any benefits from this. It's therefore totally unethical in my view. This man is taking a look from an engineer's stand point, not a doctor's.