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Incredible at this point they can’t make them unbreakable under forces seen in the human body. Testing wire is not that difficult. They’ve only been around for 50 years.
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That’s been an ongoing shitstorm for decades with pacemaker and defibrillator leads - the insulated wires that connect pacemakers and implantable defibrillators to the heart.
There are ways to make those leads highly reliable, but they are expensive and generally a bit thicker. Some companies have either cut corners or made them thinner than is safe in order to have an advantage in the market, and the result was (predictably) that they failed. We’re talking about cables that take over 11 million flex cycles in their expected use lifetime. After many failures and a lot of patient injuries and deaths, the takeaway appears to be:
-make every company do more testing and generally have a harder time to get their devices approved, when there is one company that has never launched a lead that hasn’t been recalled and two others that have never launched a lead that has been recalled.
-shift the devices themselves to “leadless” devices that are implanted directly within the hear chambers. Sounds great, but they have less capability and shorter battery life than the conventional devices and no one knows how to reliably remove them if they go bad.
Of course “leadless” pacemakers were pioneered by, you guessed it, the company that has had the vast majority of lead recalls. 
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I know - let’s bring back the plutonium-powered defibrillators!
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It turns out patients weren’t keen on being tracked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The plus side was having 20-40 year battery life, though.
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What could possibly go wrong?
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I wonder what sort of super powers you could get if you were bitten by a radioactive cardiopathic.
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What the hell does this even mean? How about “the latest knowledge based on evidence”?
Great having someone who knows nothing about how science works in charge of HHS.
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What happens if a zombie eats their brains?
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Careless or unintentional cremation of active electronic implants is a problem regardless of the power source. Lithium batteries explode, for example.
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Glow in the dark zombies dude.
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It’s also a bit of a problem if a corpse is radioactive.
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Yeah, but you’ll have the same power source as a space probe or a lighthouse in Siberia and can play tag with NISA’s NEST. Totally worth a little paperwork.
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De la Torre is the ultra-wealthy former CEO of the now-bankrupt hospital chain Steward, once the largest for-profit health care company in the country. Steward and de la Torre have been accused of being “health care terrorists” and practicing “third-world medicine” that killed and maimed patients as executives extracted millions in payouts, stripping the company of assets.
I’ve discussed this asshole before. There is not a pit of hell deep enough for his so-called soul.
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I admire the fact that they are still trying. Especially the “We gave the prior auth, but we changed our mind afterward. Sucks o be you!” one. To me, though, it just emphasizes how much the next 4 years are going to suck and how many people are going to get thrown under the rug. I just hope the MAGAts are paying attention.
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…So this is how women feel when religion
gets in the way of body autonomy…
Um, no.
While good on him for wanting to do the right thing, this guy is only being inconvenienced. He is not being denied lifesaving medical care. Not the same. He can continue to use a condom and get in with his life until he can arrange to travel at his leisure/convenience with no life-threatening time restrictions to get snipped.
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I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more, honestly. You get a lot of desperate people from the way things are run.
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