Medical business

Syndicate replies to “Medical business” topic Wed, 09/17/2008 - 06:28 — Jeff Chan

At the social on Monday, Joe mentioned that about 70% of U.S. medical costs are regulatory, and that's about the highest percentage of major industries.  If so, it would seem to make medical treatments a good candidate for a sea business.  In fact that's exactly what Patri found SurgiCruise was looking into.

http://surgicruise.com/

In terms of economic advantage, it's probably useful to look for industries, like medical, where the regulatory costs are very high.

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Wed, 09/17/2008 - 15:49 — vincecate

Medical does seem a good candidate - maybe cancer treatment

Having a legitimate medical business would not get the US ships with guns coming by, unlike an idea like having a drug resort 200 miles off California would. In Anguilla, a small island with population around 13,000, we have a medical center that does plastic surgery mostly for tourists. It seems people like to be away while they have their surgery and while they are recovering from it. Then when they come back and look different they can tell people that their vacation did them good.

There are also cancer treatments, like "mono-clonal antibodies" that seem interesting. One way to do this is to clone antibodies from the patient that target their cancer cells, put radioactive material into these cloned antibodies, and put them back into the patient. The radioactive material has a short half-life, like a few days. The antibodies find there way to the cancer so that when the radioactive particles come out they do a good job of taking out the cancer with minimal collateral damage, compared to other treatments. It seems to work rather well but it is not like the normal pills that the FDA is used to licensing. The tag line is, "giving your antibodies nuclear weapons so they can fight your cancer better". It has been around for 20 years and yet probably won't be permitted anytime soon in the USA. It seems it is not that hard to do (I knew someone who learned how to do it and did it as a summer student one summer).

I started a wiki page for this topic: http://wiki.seasteading.org/index.php/Medical_Business

Wed, 09/17/2008 - 17:19 — Jeff Chan

Medical make much sense

Thanks Vince.  The more I think about it the more I think medical treatments in general makes great sense.  Much of the developing world doesn't have nearly enough medical care facilities or doctors, and much of the developed world has it very overpriced and difficult to afford due to overregulation by their governments.  Both could benefit from having access to low-cost, high-quality healthcare that could be done near-offshore. 

Even if seasteads did only medical treatments, they would be doing the world a good service while making a good profit.  It would also be very "politically incorrect" for someone's navy to sink a hospital and kill all the doctors.

Stem cells and gene therapy are other interesting areas of cutting edge medical technology, but even plain old regular healthcare made more affordable would be a huge benefit to many people.