YouTuber builds his own x-ray machine after $69k hospital bill (2021)

Was it really because of that video? My impression from his last video was just people being unnecessarily mean to him for no reason in general, not just because of that video, but maybe I missed something.

Personally, I was super impressed by this video. It was the first time I had seen his videos (or heard of him). It was an instant subscribe for me when I saw it.

I hope he's doing well. He seemed in a really bad place in his final video.

I hope he gets better (mentally), and he comes back to making videos.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHyFihLolyg

Safety Third: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7QE72cxiBkiwnvGoFfqYOg

I feel for him personally, because I've had a similar personal "ultimatum" regarding online interaction:

I don't comment and don't contribute at all any more because the emotional load of what you receive in return just... Isn't worth it.

So much nasty, pointless noise. I was taught as a kid to "Say nothing at all, if you have nothing nice to say". Now I'm sticking to it, and some.

It's sad for sure, as this represents a macro-level chilling effect on social interaction.

I don't want to be "that Evan guy" in the comments trolling, and I don't want to risk receiving the noise of trolls. So I just opted out.

These days, I just passively consume things online, observing the waves of rage and bigotry, and letting them flow by, knowing I have no stake in their game.

Things are much better in real life, where I have great conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. We can get in to deep conversations and negativity isn't taken personally like that. Because the bandwidth is higher between participants and we care about each other.

The only remaining way I contribute, is to create one-off accounts, say what I think if it's nice, and never look at it again. I don't want to see the responses, because they just lure you in to wanting to respond, and they end up wasting emotional space in my mind.

It's his life to risk, but during Edison's days, one of his assistants lost everything to x-ray damage. His body became totally deformed.

Oddly, this Daily Mail article is somehow near the top of the results. But reading over it, it seems pretty accurate from what I remember. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7180945/X-rays-ra...

So it's not like the safety concerns are entirely off-base. But still, I agree that it's his life to risk.

I made no personal attacks, but highlighted how dangerous it is to the audience to present 10+ kV supplies as no-big-deal toys. Everyone can acquire an HV supply and play with it. Many of them even should, but certainly not because of a video demonstrating ways to kill yourself with absolute no risk assessment.

NileRed, and close friend of William Osman's, has also significantly reduced his output, because it's absurd. Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result. If you quit, someone new will take your place.

Turn's out, he even made a video about it and I simply missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVCpKfedfok

But 69k for an xray? That's where the outrage should be directed. That's evil in it's purest form. More then just simple outrage, the person responsible for charging that 69k bill is someone that needs to go to jail.

The sad thing is, the responsibility is distributed among the entire medical industry. It's very similar to the phenomenon of software engineer salaries.

You eventually learn that these are ignorant people commenting because they don't know any better - and the sea of opinions doesn't matter. Either you let them hold you against your will or you just do what you want. It's a hill anyone has to climb.

Diy xray tubes are doable, but I don't fault them for the store chili or the reused tube. It's not always important that parts be as authentically diy as the whole, in my view.

“”” I waited a respectful moment or two before asking him why he was adding canned chili to his chili. They both said it tasted terrible, but, as my dad now-famously observed: "You can start with dog shit, and if you add enough chili, you get chili."

Similarly, if you start with an Agile Methodology, and you add enough hard work, you get a bunch of work done. Go figure.

But that's a tautology; you can substitute anything you like for "Agile Methodology" and it's still true. It's probably not difficult to find people who believe that Feng Shui has brought them success in their projects for years. Or throwing pennies in fountains. Heck, there are probably some people who practice witchcraft to help their projects out, and a great many of those projects — probably the majority — wind up being successful.

If you do a rain dance for enough days in a row, it will eventually work. Guaranteed.

So I'm not saying Agile doesn't work. It does work! But it's plain, unadulterated superstition. “””

Off topic, but thanks for the link.

(I have actually built a crookes tube, for fun, but it wasn't particularly reliable or safe)

Side note: old TV rectifier tubes from the 1950s and 60s were notoriously known for being x ray emitters, and were often made with leaded glass or kept inside shielded enclosures specifically because of the X-rays. So X-ray emitters were literally in everyday standard consumer electronics back then! Kind of crazy to think about these days...

I think that blur would be problematic for fractures, at least for the variety where you aren't sure whether you should go to the hospital or not.

More generally speaking, even if we had a safe way to get X-rays at home diagnosing them is hard. The "bone is torn in half" ones are easy to see, but I don't think you'd even need an X-ray to diagnose that. The more subtle breaks are hard to pick up on. I googled for fracture X-rays, and on a lot of them I can't tell whether there's a fracture or not unless it's obviously snapped in 2.

At home X-rays make less sense to me if you're going to have to have a radiologist look at it anyways. You might as well go to an outpatient imaging place anyways.

Mobile equipment does exist, however it is usually used at smaller hospitals who don't have the space or money for a permanent unit.

This makes sense only if the source is powerful enough to penetrate what you want to image. That’s why we’re usin x-rays for this and not visible light. And a much less powerful x-ray source will deposit more energy in the hand/limb of the spectrum that does not penetrate. Hence relatively high-energy radiation delivers good images and minimizes the dose to the patient.

When I first had a retainer, they put this hair-thin wire in the clips and it didn't make any sense to me, it was so thin, it seemed pointless until the next morning when my teeth were really sore.

The dentist knew that because they are trained. They know when to adjust wires etc. same with invisiline: sure you aren't going to die but that doesn't mean you can't do some damage to your teeth or jaw.

https://dental.formlabs.com/materials/

First of all, yeah, the US system is pretty atrocious.

But healthcare in the EU means months of waiting in line or outright told to look somewhere else as they're full, cheapest procedures with no alternative, having to quite literally beg for prescription medicine that worked for you before but the new doctor doesn't want to give you, tons of preferential treatment and discrimination.

Let's be real here, the only good thing in the EU is emergency care, when you break your arm or something. Good luck with any non-life threatening problems and mental healthcare.

I mean, sure, many people have it easy, living in the good part of a country. But I'm not the only one who has experienced what can only be called absolute horseshit. Reddit is full of such threads.

But "muh affordable healthcare".

That's the first sentence of the article. Doesn't that cover that pretty well?

If someone works in legacy media, like network and cable television, printed newspaper or magazine, and they don't clearly see the shift away from print and broadcast media to Internet video, then they're totally behind the curve, and they doing exactly what you always see people in dying prominent institutions do - struggle to maintain relevancy using any method possible. In this case, I would argue, "downplaying" so-called "new media" people.

Sam Harris said it best when explaining why he doesn't make book writing his focus any longer: "I can reach 100,000 people by writing a book, which will take about a year from idea to published hardcover, or I can record a podcast, which will take a day, and reach 500,000 people."

I don't think it's related to trying to devalue 'YouTuber' as a profession.

How can an x-ray cost more than a pair of shoes? They used to use x-rays at the shoe store to check fit - for free. Say this to any doctor in the US and watch the silence on their face.

XRay machines are pretty basic afaik compared to say, an MRI and at that price you could get 2 nights in the New York Hilton penthouse!

Most people don't pay rack rates (that's the quote for $69K), many orgs amortize costs across many people, and hospitals run 24/7 and have to maintain a lot of standing infra. The capital costs for acquiring a pro-grade x-ray (and staff it) are nontrivial.

But yes, a single x-ray should never cause a bill for $69K. Even if the user only pays $5K.

If you go to a clinic, which works 9-5 M-F, they're $40 (chest x-ray for a green card), 20minute wait.

Still exorbitant, but it wasn’t just for the X-ray. Ultimately it’s because hospitals and insurance companies are part of a legal price-fixing scheme.

I'm from a third world hellhole and it costs me just 8 bucks to do it.

I get that isn't the game here. But most games are based on some kind of reality. This one seems completely disconnected.

This sort of youtubers who try to convince people with no relevant background that xray tubes are super safe, metallic mercury is fine to handle with your bare hands and magnetrons are ok to run in the open (or even pointed at your skull) are unbelievably irresponsible. There's a whole generation of teenagers growing up not realizing that these are basically stunts.

Stunts even more dangerous than those fake parkour videos showing people jumping off the 3rd floor of a building, because at least in that case we have build-in reflexes stopping us from reenacting them.

Also consider that you'll need someone to develop the films and read the xrays. They aren't doing it for free.

For humans though, as someone who's worked in a hospital, xrays are extremely useful. We see lots of broken bones. Confirming the break is important so that you know to put the patient in a cast, but more importantly, the type of break can sometimes require surgery to set the bone.

I'm not sure how many xrays rule out a fracture, rather than confirm it, but it's not 99.9%. If I had to guesstimate, maybe 10-20% of possible fracture xrays confirm a fracture. That percentage probably increases greatly as patients age. Kids very often come in with sprains that their parents want xrays, whereas a lot of elderly people break bones more easily.

Not sure where this assumption is from. A doctor can sometimes tell when something is outright broken, but in a lot of cases they need to take x-rays to tell if there's a hairline fracture or something small that might not present with a lot of pain. X rays also tell the actual severity.

In particular, hospitals in the US are well–known for lying about their prices. You’ll get a bill for some ridiculous amount, and your insurance will negotiate it down to something more reasonable. Of course they don’t negotiate prices on a case–by–case basis; instead the large insurance companies negotiate “bulk discounts” ahead of time. It is unlikely that his insurance paid more than $10k. Ironically he probably could have paid even less if he had asked for the cash prices at the hospital, and then gotten reimbursed by his insurance.

But even that is too much. If he had gone to his primary–care physician or an urgent–care clinic he probably would have paid a tenth of that or less, plus he could have slept in his own bed.

You know it consistently baffled me that someone can look at a person who struggles to pay a hospital bill and think that moving to a different country is a viable option.

Not every discussion about something in the physical world needs to start with a low effort comment about how you can die by cranking it to 11 and then abusing it.

X-rays generated by slamming accelerated electrons into a metal plate turn off immediately once power is removed. There is no residual radioactive decay, because there were no unstable or decaying isotopes at any point in the process. It's not a nuclear process. It does not involve the nucleus.

In contrast, the Goiânia accident was the result of beta radiation from a pile of decaying Cesium 137 that could only be contained, not turned off.

Please don't spread around misinformation.

Once the power is off, there is no more radiation from the internals of an X-Ray Machine.

Heck, we have portable X-Ray dental cameras now.

They are still dangerous, but orders of magnitude lesser than true radioactive elements.

An article about insured people going medically bankrupt. When things go according to plan and insurance covers everything it all good but when it doesn't it next to impossible for people to afford it. And it's not like bankrupois without consequences

Isn’t medical bankruptcy the leading cause of bankruptcy? What are you talking about?

... I mean, I assume one of the more common methods of defaulting is bankruptcy?