Medical Miracles Possible with 3-D Printers Mick Ebeling - Not Impossible Labs
go to original August 14, 2014

Using prosthetics made on 3-D printer, a boy in a Sudan refugee camp, whose arms were blown off in the war, can now feed himself. At Mexico’s Teletón Children’s Rehabilitation Center, we are exploring ways to duplicate expensive and badly needed medical equipment to help rehabilitate children with cerebral palsy so they can walk again.

The medical possibilities of 3-D printing are astounding, and I suspect we’ve only discovered the tip of the iceberg. When you watch the incredibly rapid development of 3-D printing, it is not the work of major companies that is breathtaking, though that’s enormously important; it’s guys in their basement who are coming up with incredible solutions to seemingly impossible problems.

Three-dimensional printing can give everybody, regardless of their income level, access to the things that matter. Simple 3-D printers can be had for a couple hundred bucks, which means that people all over the world can have access to medical technologies that were out of reach just a few years ago. And most important, they don’t have to rely on government bureaucracies to provide the technologies, or the boards of big businesses to approve them – they can just go online, grab some open-source versions of what they need, and print them out.

The 3-D printer effortlessly, and almost immediately, takes ideas and makes them tangible. There’s no middleman. There’s just what you think and what you make, and increasingly those are becoming one and the same.

For more info visit the Not Impossible Labs website

See the original at The New York Times

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