For those not reading the story, which appears to be many, the company that services the implant went bankrupt. The implant was experimental. There exists no one to service it any longer. It will pose a health risk down the road without someone servicing it.
The only thing that forced her to have the implant removed is the fact that it would eventually lead to her untimely death if it remained in with no one to take care of the device.
Even if her death is guaranteed by leaving it in (and I’m not sure it is without more information), does that make it ethical to remove? Perhaps the patient would prefer a shorter life with greater quality in regards to her seizures. After all, don’t we allow and accept cancer patients to forgo treatment and enjoy the time they have left?
Frankly the articles I’ve found all use a mix of really weird language. In some places it says she was ‘advised’ to remove it by doctors, which makes a lot of sense. In others they talk about finances and purchasing the implant from the company.
My guess is that it was a combination of factors and while she ultimately did not want to give up the device despite being urged by doctors (she accepted the risk of leaving it in), but she was robbed of the possibility by capitalism and the fact that the company was forced to liquidate assets as terms of going bankrupt or being bought by another company. But we might have to wait for a court case or proper reporting to find out.
I hope we are able to enshrine some rights over forced explantation in the future. As soon as a device is implanted in you, you should own it 100%, no matter the cost of the device. To encourage making this possible even for extremely expensive devices, we should probably offer huge write offs or some other incentive to these companies lest they decide to restrict their purchase to only rich clients.
Owning the device doesn’t help if it requires regular maintenance and there’s nobody able to do it anymore.
I mean, we should protect against that too by requiring a certain level of service. But at the very least they need to own the device and have the right to leave the device in, even if it would fail or potentially cause them harm. I pointed that out because it sounds like they wanted to leave it in and not listen to the doctors advice to remove it, but could not for some reason. The only reason I can imagine would involve someone paying for the surgery to remove it against her will is one in which she does not own the device and the alternative is being burdened with a massive debt to pay off the device.
True ownership would imply also having access to the code and documentation, a third party should be able to maintain it with that.
Yeah I don’t think this is a coding issue. This is something on your brain and if the hardware requires maintenance you better have qualified surgeons that know and understand the device. Of that’s no longer possible because the producer no longer exists then it’s maybe not a bad idea to have it removed, depending on some factors of course like “how long does she have left to live” and “how much does she suffer.eithout the device”.
Why would a medical device exist such that even with documentation a surgeon unaffiliated with the company cannot safely interact with it? You would think it would be a design priority for any maintenance to be straightforward and with clear instructions. I have a hard time imagining that the problem here is anything other than proprietary information being tied up in red tape.
This, right here, is really important. We already have otherwise useful things being bricked because the software is no longer updated, or worse, the company goes bankrupt. If that’s our future with brain implants, that’s going to be a big problem.
she accepted the risk of leaving it in
It doesn’t say that. It says she was willing to pay to keep it in, which means she was willing to pay for long-term maintenance. But there was nobody willing to provide maintenance, because the company dissolved. That is why she was advised to remove the device.
the company was forced to liquidate assets
Implants generally go in the garbage after removal.
Implants that failed to gain FDA approval definitely go in the garbage after removal. Nobody else wants them, in fact the company will end up having to pay for proper disposal of medical waste.
It sits on the edge of the concept of informed consent in the realm of things like SaaS and copyright. Obviously doctors wouldn’t hold her down and pull it out, but obviously it probably was not useful to leave in. I wonder if there was a contract stating it had to be removed upon demand, like at the end of a trial or the bankruptcy that occurred. It’s something that we’re going to likely see in the future, as medical technology starts using computers to actively treat disorders.
She was advised to remove it.
I think “forced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People use it to refer to unpleasant decisions, like “I was forced to leave New York City after I lost my job”.
For those not reading the story, which appears to be many, the company that services the implant went bankrupt. The implant was experimental. There exists no one to service it any longer. It will pose a health risk down the road without someone servicing it.
The story doesn’t directly say that’s why it had to be removed (and she talks about wanting to buy it). I found another source that explains that the device came with a three-year battery life.
For profit companies and medicine cannot co-exist.
Yah. My BS counter is clicking quite a lot with this one.
You can’t force someone into surgery against their will. No hospital or doctor would do that. It would be a major crime. The surgeon, anesthesiologist, who knows how many others, would go to prison! That kind of crime.
The company may have coerced her, with threats of lawsuits. But that’s very different. And the article completely avoids any mention of exactly how she was forced to go through with it. If that information was included, it would only make the company look worse. I can’t think of why it would be left out, given the narrative they’re creating here.There is a lot missing from this story.
I’d bet she took a some kind of settlement that included payment and a form of NDA.People being contractually obligated to undergo medically unnecessary surgery is still an intolerable atrocity.
The company may have coerced her, with threats
in other words - forced
No. Force is when there are no threats. The “or else” goes away. There are no other options. It’s only “this is happening”.
If a toddler is refusing to wear their shoes. Taking away their toys isn’t force. It’s coercion. Force would be, grabbing their leg and putting their shoe on, no matter how much they scream or cry.
Forcing an adult to do something, is a very extreme action. Reserved exclusively for police, and even they have limits. Even the police can’t force you to have surgery.
Your bullshit counter is broken, Steven
here’s the link from MIT technology review : https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/25/1073634/brain-implant-removed-against-her-will/
here’s their imprimatur from the MIT itself : https://news.mit.edu/1995/tech-review-0201
I’d have that clicking checked out
That has no additional information. I’m not saying the story is made up. Just that it leaves out a lot of important details about what exact mechanism was used to “force” her.
If she’s insured, she would lose her insurance, if her medical care is being provided at no cost from the state through medicare she would lose that, so, they really leave the person no choice. Show up and have this fucking thing removed, or lose any future medical care whatsoever. I mean, it’s still a choice, sure. No one forces anyone to eat or drink either, Steve.
That’s speculation. They seem like reasonable possibilities, but we don’t know because it wasn’t explained.
At worse, all that is coercion. Well mostly just natural consequences really. Still not force.People can absolutely be forced to eat or drink. It’s been done in the past, when inmates go on a hunger strike. Half a dozen people strap them down, force a feeding tube down their throats. If lucky, they’d be sedated first.
The articles point out the company went bankrupt and her doctors advised her to remove the implant. It says she was willing to pay to keep it, and suggests this could have been avoided if another company could have taken over device maintainance.
All of which suggests that the device was removed because it could no longer be maintained, despite her willingness to pay.
So while governments can bailout big companies that are able to serve their greater interests, medical companies with cases like this and the bionic-eye one slip away without any kind of intervention?
We have multi-million-dollar VC funds for an app and this shit is allowed to happen.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.
Leggett was, as a recent paper in the journal Brain Stimulation about her situation explains, 49 when she was recruited for the trial, though she’d suffered from epilepsy since she was just three years old.
Leggett, who declined to be interviewed by the Tech Review after a recent stroke, also developed a symbiotic relationship with the implant, and told the researchers behind the Brain Stimulation paper that she and the BCI “became one.”
In fact, it calls to mind a similar incident last year in which the manufacturer of a bionic eye decided the units were obsolete, leading patients who’d had them implanted to lose their vision again.
It sounds like dystopian fiction that biotech companies could play takesie-backsies with patients’ implants, in other words, but the reality is we’ve already crossed into that world.
And if devices such as Leggett’s BCI can, as she suggested to researchers over the years, become part of a person, then their removal “represents a form of modification of the self,” Ienca said, and he and his coauthors are arguing that there need to be updated patients’ rights when it comes to these sorts of outcomes.
Saved 62% of original text.
Formatting tip: It would be great if there was a line break after you explain that you’re a bot and before your summary starts.
In my app and the web it appears to have a line break and I also have to tap through a spoiler tag to view the summary.
Weird. Maybe there’s something incompatible with wefwef then. Mine shows the intro statement and then the article starts immediately after the “click here” text (which I can’t actually click lol).
Edit: So I just checked on Memmy and it comes up with the “I am a bot…” and the “click here” works, but after clicking it it’ll only show the first paragraph of the summary… 🤷♂️
One step closer to Repo Men becoming reality.
Zydrate Anatomy is an absolute banger though.
yours is not the Repo Man I think of when I think of Repo Man
I’m guessing the patients were required beforehand to sign forms consenting to the device being taken out in the event of ___________ (in this case, the company going under). Because otherwise I don’t understand how it’d be legal to force someone to have brain surgery against their will.
But if the company can’t continue maintenance and support for the device, why not have her sign new forms exempting them from liability and just let her keep it? Is potential liability not the only limiting factor here? And would this be ethical?
why not just let her keep it
It could also be for patenting reasons.
You can always legally revoke consent for medical interventions, too.
Or, at least, that’s my understanding as a layman.
Every implant legal agreement must include a clause allowing the patient to keep the device in the event of company bankruptcy.
This story was described more accurately by The New Yorker. No, they did not do anything without her consent.
For three years after her operation, Leggett lived happily with her device. But in 2013 her neurologist gave her some bad news. NeuroVista had run out of funding and ceased operations. Leggett’s neural device would have to come out.
Leggett felt grateful that everyone involved was sympathetic to her plight. They let her keep the implant as long as possible. But the demise of NeuroVista—after spending seventy million dollars to develop the technology and conduct the trial, it struggled to find further investors—made removal inevitable. If the battery ran out, or a lead broke, or the site of implantation became infected, the company would no longer be there to provide support. She remembered a solemn drive to Melbourne for the surgery, and then coming back home without the device. It felt as if she had left a part of herself behind.
These days, when she gets a funny, flip-floppy feeling inside, she takes anti-seizure medication. She’s not always sure. Sometimes she gets her husband to weigh in. He says, “Go with your first instinct,” and usually she takes a pill. She is now seizure-free.
The article also suggests that other patients had problems with the device, which may have contributed to the failure of the clinical trial and recommendation for removal.
