zlacker

>>bondar+(OP)
Why do ideas like this take so long to be tested/adopted? Is it because the alternatives are “good enough”? I would think the evidence would lead to a fast shift; though maybe moving slowly is a good thing when it is surgeries.

>>jasont+lA
Research and subsequently clinical testing is expensive so you have to acquire capital, usually from grant providers or working with private industry. Grant providers tend to be conservative and risk-averse so that means individuals with new ideas often won't be able to explore them until later in their career. Private industry is less risk averse but will only fund research if it has the potential to bring a patentable product to market before the parent expires.

Even once you have funding secured, the regulatory approval process is long and requires hundreds of pages of documentation, reporting, and compliance. Then you have to get insurance to cover it, which can require a procedural code being generated for it by the AMA and requires convincing insurers it's worth it, particularly Medicare in the US which other insurers take their cues from. And even once a procedure is approved and a patient can get it paid for, you still have inertia from human physicians who have been trained to perform certain kinds of treatments and not others.

>>derekt+cL
Surgeries aren't regulated in the same way that drugs are, though. AFAIK the bureaucratic threshold for experimental surgeries is much lower.

>>inglor+Qr1
You're entirely correct. I was trying to speak about medical therapies generally but the FDA doesn't regulate surgical techniques. Some new surgical techniques do require experimental medical devices which would require FDA approval though. And you still have to deal with the bureaucratic hurdles of acquiring grants for clinical trials and getting insurers to cover treatments of course, but it's certainly a lower barrier.