I was once sent to a Harley Street clinic by my then employer, to look at a broken PEME machine. I was a mainframe support engineer then and had no experience of any medical equipment other than what my old man used (he was a GP).
The physician at this clinic, (who seemed quite unlike a physician), said the company who had been maintaining these machines had fallen out with her.
I tactfully asked to see any documentation she had as I had no clue about what a PEME machine was and she produced a leaflet. As she opened the draw to get this, I caught a glimpse of the manual for the machine with “FOR EQUESTRIAN USE ONLY” stamped clearly on the front cover! I got a quick look at it when she went out of the room for a bit – lots of pics of how to use it – ON A HORSE! WTF?
I opened up the machine to see if there was anything easy to rectify, like a fuse blown and discovered a PCB laden with coil inductors. Having worked on manufacturing HF circuits years before, I realised that the tiniest bending of these coils could send the high frequency circuits wildly out of tolerance. I called the office and explained that we couldn’t do anything without schematics. I was then asked to take it back to the office.
Before I left, a woman brought her small child in for treatment with one of the other machines!? I left feeling really concerned, but this physician was supposedly a friend of the MD of the company I worked for, so I had my hands tied.
When I got the thing back to the office, I explained to the engineering director that there were some serious ethical issues – the machine was not approved for use on humans. Aside from this, as we had no schematics etc, the HF circuits could be well out of spec. As the machine was engineered to radiate electomagnetic energy to warm deep tissues to promote healing, an HF circuit being out of adjustment could potentially be very harmful – bit like putting your hand in a microwave!
He sat back in his chair and looked at me for a few seconds and cajoled me in an arrogant tone “You are worrying about nothing, it’s just a little circuit board”. I politely told him he’d have to get someone else to go there in future as I was not going to be a part of it. He was an non-technical sales guy by trade – but a **** arrogant ignoramus! What an oki cokey outfit that was!
We hear much about cowboy builders (an easy target), but who would dare challenge Harley Street physicians? There is a general opinion that Harley Street is where some of the finest medical people in the world reside, so it’s a shocker to find some seedy little back street style clinic there, run by unqualified quacks!
You wouldn’t catch me blindly phoining one of these clinics. I’d insist on recommendation from a senior health expert who works for the NHS.
Scary stuff!!
