Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Wow. The entire premise of the article aside, for me the idea that medical treatments can be made with physics and not medicine was an incredible, incredible revelation.

This man (not a doctor!) has invented a method to neutralize sperm in a way that would never have occurred to me. He uses the most basic principles of physics (magnetic charge) to neutralize sperm!

Realizing that sperm is negatively charging, he simply coats a short section of the inside of the vas (tiny tube going from testes to the penis, located in the scrotum) with a positively-charged polymer. As sperm travels in this coated tube, the ionic attraction causes damage on a cellular level in the sperm, the pull effect effectively destroying the sperm "tail" and preventing it from fertilizing a female but without hormonal/medical methods!

For me, as an engineer, this was a true revelation.

As a physicist, I have been, on odd occasions of boredom and quarter-life-crisis, tempted to go into medicine. But the only type of medicine I'd be interested in is radiology.

Walk in, cure a patient with physics, walk out, earn $600K a year. Sounds pretty sweet!

What's that? You have cancer? No worries, I have radioactive beams! Zap! You're cured!

Unfortunately you gotta go through many years of the more usual, squishy form of medicine before they'll let you become a radiologist, so I stuck with my existing career path.

I knew a radiation oncologist in the late 90s, and his reason for becoming a webapp startup founder instead was that radiology was destroying him: in that field, most of your patients die, rather than being cured. You're mostly just prolonging things.

I see. And this is really frustrating unless you change the mindset to take everyday that is gained as a little victory for patients to enjoy life. But for patients of terminal cancers, the quality of life only deteriorates.

Having seen both my parents suffered terminal cancers and passed away, I think any economical way that can make people living to the end without losing quality of life is more important than prolonging life. And IMHO that is a very tough problem to work on.

All patients die. The job of a specialist is to make sure they die of something else.

Am I missing something, or does the article in no way explain what is charged and how?

magnetic charge? really? I don't think so.

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