Voltage-variable capacitor doesn't work in LTSpice

You must be at the point now where you walk into a Doctor's office or operating room, look around and say to yourself. "I designed that, and that, and that...."

Pretty good insurance in case you ever get sick. They're fixing you with your own stuff!

You should post a list of all the instruments you have designed so we can be sure they use nothing else when they want to cut us open:)

Not anymore, I moved largely away from med tech. This is the only major med project I am involved in right now and for the foreseeable future. Much of that market got jinxed by Obamacare and I saw it coming, so branched out into industrial electronics and stuff.

When it comes to intravascular ultrasound, yes, then I'd like to be diagnosed with one of our machines if that is ever necessary. Because it is the only fully electronic system on the planet and I sure would not like them to snake a catheter with a spinning shaft up into my coronary blood vessels. Not that it's inherently too unsafe but it kind of scares me. Plus IMHO our image quality is better and more consistent.

Weird, but that little current sink, with L=0, runs at home but gets NAN crashes when I run it at work. Must be some different Spice setting.

Just out of curiosity, why would Obamacare affect the med tech business? There would still be a need for equipment, and as far as I can tell, the equipment cost would not change. What happened to ruin the business?

Just the idea of a catheter snaking around inside scares me. Not much choice, though. Fortunately, my doc uses the wrist as the entry point (when possible). Don't know anything about spinning stuff, though.

Med device tax, for one.

Lesson learned: Go home when you want to solve a really tough problem. No kidding, I solved one (a difficult safety feature that I am sure the Federales will insist on) yesterday on a 36mi mountain bike ride. Then around mile 30 a large rock got kicked up by the front wheel and hit me in the right shin at a delta-V of 15-20mph. It still hurts.

Several things, the most important ones being:

1. A new 2.3% medical device tax, as Keith said. This gets creamed off the top from gross revenue, not from profits. So a start-up that naturally won't be able to make profits for the first few years will have to fork over an additional tax. More established companies that run only a slim profit got that wiped out.

1. Culling of services and fees. In order to finance this gigantic welfare expansion the president and his people thought it smart to simply cut reimbursements and such. If a doctor can barely break even, how do they think he or she will do if they cut down another 21% or whatever?

Anyhow, this has predictably resulted in a souring of the investment climate and it has become much tougher to find funding for a medical device start-up. While I participate in the development of an idea that did manage to get funded I also found in my other consulting work that the pocket books in med devices for R&D and thus also for consulting work are now a lot tighter. They are not in fields such as oil, gas, industrial and so on. Therefore, that's where my work mainly headed.

This is for the more serious stuff such as snaking up ultrasound catheters or stents riding on balloon catheter tips. They go in through a cut in the femoral artery where they place a temporary lockable port, just during the procedure.

Get a ton of exercise, don't smoke, don't eat bad stuff and you might never need this done. But for some people the conditions are heredetary, not much they can do about it. A friend of ours just got a whole new heart valve delivered and installed with such a procedure. They didn't have to crack his chest for open heart surgery, a procedure he might not have survived due to other medical conditions.

I get all my best ideas in the shower. Luckily, our water heater has an 80 gallon tank.

More serious than a triple bypass? ;-) He does angioplasty and stents through the wrist. Don't know about ultrasound. If at all possible he doesn't use the femoral artery. That has a lot of complications that the wrist doesn't have. It's a straight run from the right wrist (or elbow) to the heart.

Pretty much a genes thing. My brother had a couple of stents a week before I had the catheterization/ He, too, should have had a triple bypass but they blew it so he'll have to wait a year for the surgery. Another brother died of sudden death syndrome. He was the one who was anal about all the exercise and diet stuff. He swam two miles three times a week and did a couple of hours at the gym 7 days. Didn't help.

I got the whole zipper deal. In addition to the three cabbages, I got a maze. ;-) All in all, it beats cancer, which other than a little skin cancer (my mother, in her 90s), no one in my family on either side has had.

Thanks for taking the time to post, Joerg. That is a very alarming picture, and I'm glad you got out in time.

Bigger stuff usually only fits through the femoralis. It's pretty routine. One of the cardiologists said that he feels like a glorified plumber.

But it still does other things. I bet he feels really good after exercise. When I came home from a 36mi hard mountain bike ride yesterday night I felt like a Viking warrior on a horse.

Alzheimer's can be much worse. Many of these people know full well that they are losing their brains but it can be agonzingly slow. Some know exactly want they want to communicate but can't get it out. For years.

I hope some day we'll get real healthcare reform but that cannot come from the current administration. Obamacare completely missed the boat. For example, there are no provisions in that law to open the chargemaster to patients and everyone else and also to cut ambulance chasers out of the deal.

The chargemaster secrecy alone is huge. Case in point: Eye exam was needed. So we inquired and at one out-of-network doctor the procedure with prescription would have cost about $70. Called the HMO to see what they charge. To out great surprise since we have a high-deductible plan they said that it's no charge at all, like preventative care. So we went. _Then_ we got a statement for $163. I called. "Oh, sorry, you were given wrong information but it's your responsibility to check the coverage". Which we can't because most of it isn't disclosed. This is despicable and a serious cancer in US health care.

Oh, oh, the guys in Sacramento will come down on you now. Drought legislation is in the making. We already started early last year to cut the water consumption during showers to a minimum. Like not running the water while soaping up.

Obamacare sold out to all the big stakeholders, to get it to pass. I suspect that it was actually designed to fail.

Yup. Published price lists should be mandatory. There's no other business that can charge whatever they want after the product is delivered.

I can believe that. My cardiologist doesn't do anything past the plumbing. If more is needed he passes it off to the surgeon. He's good but real surgery is not his specialty.

Drugs do the same thing, in the same way. Dopamine, Serotonin, and Endorphins.

Agreed.

But with exercise it only happens after reaching a certain endurance level. When I started intense biking 1-1/2 years ago I was huffing and puffing after 15 mile of hills and my only thought was "Get me off of this bike!". Now it's different.

From the discussion, I understand med tech companies aren't making much money, and are laying off people. Doctors are barely able to scrape by.

From Wikipedia, "According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.2%), than any other nation in

So who is making all the money in health care? Is it the hospitals with their obscene chargemaster lists?