medlatest Editorial

If you negotiate your way around all 19 halls you’ll know what the title means. Medica is a staggering display of medical devices and technologies that leaves the visitor or exhibitor tired and in need of “bier und würst”. the show starts on Wednesday 14th.

“View From The Med” for week 45 is available for your contemplation and perusal and downright disagreement if you like, right now.

Medical professionals are always right. They must be, because we don’t bother to regulate their practices, let alone require formal centralised approval of new techniques prior to their introduction. Meanwhile the device industry is increasingly regulated. We ask whether this is all entirely the best way of doing things.

Medical device regulation is like a colander. It will catch most of what you want it to catch, but every so often a bit of spaghetti slips through the hole. A UK parliamentary committee has decided we must plug all the holes right away, which brings us to question the function of the thing in the first place.

Here’s a challenge. Watch the video and then say you don’t care where your medical devices come from as long as they’re cheap.

It’s a fairly polarised argument. If you are in the camp that believes explanted ICDs could and should be donated and re-used in low income countries you’ll appreciate this new paper. However there’s also support for the nay sayers’ arguments in the study.

Medlatest has gone all multimedia with the introduction of a weekly podcast of its View From The Med. Heavy going stuff? Not a bit of it as we like to combine getting it off our chests with a hopefully positive spin on the world of medical devices.

Why does the humble press release provoke such a lack of attention amongst PR marketers except at congress time? We explore the arguments and decide the art may be dying, but should remain a core component of the coordinated marcoms plan.

It’s quarterly financials time… pretty tedious fare, but we have a go at spicing it all up a little. Well someone has to because there’s not much room for humour in it all.

It’s taken the illegal actions of a rogue implant manufacturer to catalyse what looks increasingly like a radical reform of the cosmetic “surgery” industry in the UK. Lots of sensible recommendations from the aesthetic surgical fraternity, but weren’t these obvious deficiencies?

Some of the best medtech innovations come from the simplest concepts, but it all starts by asking the right question first. Whether you agree or not, the week’s timely editorial talks TAVI and questions the concept of the unmet need.

Our weekly medtech news editorial celebrates innovation this time. Maybe in these straitened times fortune favours the brave investor and the best inventor.

Gimme a P, Gimme an M, Gimme an A. What do you get? Well, not quite a PMA, but the end result might look mighty like it by the time it hits the streets. Not a bad thing though, and there’s lots of really sensible and even pragmatic stuff in the new device regs, especially the re-hash of notified body rules.

Taken at face value some new data and reporting suggests that a U.S. style PMA might deliver little benefit in terms of patient safety, yet delay innovations from reaching the market by 43 months. We argue it’s more subtle than that.

The week’s medical device news in one piece of editorial. Quite a challenge, so we don’t even try to capture it all. Highlights and opinions in one bite-size package.

Do the recently announced job losses in medtech signifiy some sort of retrenchment or do they represent sensible planning in the run up to the medical device sales tax? Or a bit of both? Either way, there are a number of Americans losing there jobs just about now, which somewhat overshadows the week’s better news. Good news, bad news, all of life is here.