The Corpus Callosum : Peak Oil, Proton Therapy, and the Future of High-Tech Medicine
May 9th, 2008 | by admin |One thing about hospitals, is that they use an awfullot ofelectricity. We already know about some of thechallengesthat will occur in health care in the post-peak-oil era; I wrote aboutthat in October2007.
…Petroleum scarcity will affect the health systemin at least 4 ways:through effects on medical supplies and equipment, transportation,energy generation, and food production…
One way this will affect medical care is that it will change therelative costs of certain kinds of care. Everything will costmore, of course. More interestingly, the costs for somethings will rise much faster than for others. For example,the cost for ICU care — already staggeringly expensive — will risefaster than less intensive kinds of care.
I was thinking about this when I was reading up on protontherapy. Proton therapy is a kind ofradiation treatment, usually used to kill tumors. There areonly a few proton therapy facilities in the world (five in the USA). More are being planned, but it is controversial. The reason they are controversial, is that devices usedhappento be the most expensive medical devices on the planet.
The facilities are the size of a football field. They have tocontain a cyclotron, which weighs over 200 tons. Yes, the areefforts to reduce the size and expense of the devices, but they areunproven.
In fact, in most cases, the advantages of proton therapy overconventional radiation therapy are unproven. There aretheoretical reasons to believe it is better: protons penetrate tissuefor a certain distance before releasing any energy. Thedistance is determined by how much energy they have. Theamount of energy can be varied; it is possible to calculate how tofocus the beam, and how much energy to give it, so that the greatmajority of the energy is delivered to the tumor. This leavessurrounding tissue relatively unaffected.
Anyway, this is exactly the kind of thing that is going to be impactedby energy costs. Proton therapy already is controversialbecause of the expense. Whatever the benefits, we have to wonderwhether it makes sense to go around building these things, when thecost to operate them may very well be prohibitive in the near future.
Yes, those in the know will say that there are promising efforts under way to develop cheaperproton therapy devices, using new technology. (Using dielectric-wall accelerators instead of cyclotrons) That might help, but there is a limit to how much you canreduce the energy requirements and still have an effective device.
Oh, and of course there is a political wrinkle to this story. Remember Tommy Thompson? He was theSecretary for Health and Human Services during 2001-2007. He gainednotoriety when he spoke at at the Religious Action Center ofReform Judaism, and commented…
“I’m in the private sector and for the first time inmy life I’m earning money. You know that’s sort of part of the Jewishtradition and I do not find anything wrong with that.”
By the way, according to OpenSecrets, Thompson was already doing rather well financially,when he worked for Bush. He could have retired in 2007, andnever had to worry.
Thompson made the comment while he was preparing his ill-advisedpresidential campaign. That never got off the ground,obviously.
Given his background at HHS, he was hoping to make his expertise onhealth care policy a big point in his campaign. He claimedthat he would reduce costs by emphasizing preventative care.
So what is he doing now, to “earn money?” He’s the director ofthe Board at Procure, a company that makes proton therapycenters. Yes, the guy who was going to moderate the cost ofhealth care, is now hawking the most expensive medical devices in thesolar system. Devices that we might not even be able to use,when the cost of energy becomes prohibitive, and that could becomeobsolete, if the dielectric-wall accelerator works asexpected.
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