3D printing stethoscopes, tourniquets and crucial dialysis-machine parts in Gaza

Tarek Loubani is a Palestinian-Canadian doctor who works with the Glia Project, a group that creates open-source designs for 3D-printable medical hardware. Their goal is to let local populations manufacture their own medical wares at prices considerably lower than in the marketplace, and in situations where -- because of distance or war -- it may not even be possible to ship in equipment at any price. Some of their early work has been in blockaded Gaza, for example.

So far, Glia has designed a stethoscope that can be made for about $2.83, and a tourniquet that costs about $7 to make.

But Glia's also developing a project that's even more ambitious, and crazily interesting: An open-source dialysis machine.

In the current issue of Logic magazine (which is amazing front to back, BTW), Loubani talked about how regulatory capture has jacked up the price of dialysis, and how to use open-source to design around it. I'll quote it at length here, because Loubani's description of the problem and the hack is super eloquent:

Dialysis is also an interesting problem of capitalism. A good analogy is disposable razors. Broadly, in Canada, theres Schick and theres Gillette. You cant use a Schick razor on a Gillette handle and vice versa. Thats called vendor lock-in.

Fundamentally, dialysis machines are a pump, a controller, a flow meter, and a little bit of tubing. Nothing special. The only way for companies to make them profitable is to create vendor lock-in and collude with each other.