Vaccinations could be made less painful by treating skin with a vaccine-laden liquid and using ultrasound to push it into the body
Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.
Sweet, now they can charge me $1k for a shot and not use a needle.
Last time I got an ultrasound the hospital charged me $2k. Wanted to confirm nothing was wrong with my kidneys. Turns out I was all good, but now I have an expensive bill to deal with...
$2k is largely the doctors time for the procedure, plus interpretation (sometimes another doctor entirely, particularly when multiple opinions are warranted).
Of course, the equipment probably isn't cheap either
Edit - damn. Looks like I was very wrong on this one!
90-95% of imaging cost is the technical fee. An ultrasound is usually 0.5 to 1.0 RVUs roughly. So let's say 1. The RVU rate for radiologists right now is around $45-60 an RVU. So of the $2k for the ultrasound, a Radiologist will make about $50 of it.
In my recent experience, that wasn’t the case. Ultrasound at the ER was $370 for the contracted radiologist. And a whipping $1700 for a 5 minute use of the machine.