Americans know the plight of medical bills and how quickly they can ramp up to astronomical heights. For those with insurance , these can maybe be made manageable, but for those without, it becomes a heavy burden.
One man in California, when facing quite the hefty bill, decided to hell with hospitals and modern medicine, he’d just build his own medical equipment in his garage! He did this to some degree of success, too.
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California resident William Osman had to take a trip to the hospital recently.
His medical treatment involved a two-night stay at the hospital along with medication and an abdominal CT scan, narrowly avoiding surgery. When he was through, he was left with a nearly $70,000 medical bill.
Luckily, his insurance covered most of it, but he still thought this to be wildly expensive.
So, in his moment of frustration with the healthcare system, he decided to try and eliminate one medical cost forever.
See, Osman is an engineer, so he decided to build his own home X-ray machine.
He spent a few months sourcing and gathering the materials needed for such a project, stating that the most difficult part of the build was working on an energy-converting glass X-ray tube. To solve this, he used an old dental X-ray head and removed the high-voltage circuit from it to wire the tube to his own 60k volt power supply.
All in all, the actual construction of the machine took less than a day.
And wouldn’t you know it, it worked! The picture above is one taken with the machine of his own hand.
Of course, he’s aware of the dangers of owning a machine that emits radiation in one’s own home, so he wasn’t firing it all willy nilly.
“For my entire time owning this tube, it’s been powered on for less than 20 seconds, […]. I specifically used a low-light camera with a long exposure so I could capture a quality image with less X-rays,” he explained in the video.
However, the radiation wasn’t even his biggest concern.
Rather, it was the power supply.
“I used 40kV silicone insulated wire and surrounded that with additional silicone tubing, and then just stayed away from the tube during operation. After the initial tests, a giant 2mm lead sheet was placed around the tube.”
Despite the complications and the worries, he succeeded in his goal.
He said that the machine was taken apart after the video since he really only built it for “demonstration purposes,” but should he ever need to get an X-ray again, he has the materials and the know-how to save him the cost.
h/t: Popular Mechanics
