How hard is it to make these strips? Could you do it at home with a chemistry textbook and a book on paper-making techniques? Could a startup company do it?
If the strips really did cost only 5 cents to make, you would expect to see third party companies start making “compatible” strips and sell them for less than the brand name. You know, kind of like how you can now buy third-party ink and toner cartridges and third-party almost anything for your car. Where are the generic test strip suppliers? Anyone have a number? Bueller?
And you cannot ReliOn them at all to give an accurate reading in my experience. They always would read way over compared to my Bayer meter and the readings that my doctor took confirmed this.
My doctor says they’re fine, especially considering the cost. When it’s all you can afford, you take what you can get. I’ll try to do a comparison with another meter later to see what sort of difference I get in the reading.
They essentially use the ‘computer printer’ business model, i.e. they sell the printers themselves at a loss and make up for it by charging a fortune for the ink/toner cartridges. Used to be called the ‘razor blade model’ because they sell them the same way. Over the years I’ve had at least five or six different glucose meters and I’ve never paid anything for the meters themselves.
Wow, you must be young. When I first started in nursing, as a nursing assistant, we had to put 5 ccs of the patient’s urine in a test tube, drop in a highly toxic “tablet”, wait for it to foam up then settle, then compare the color of that to a chart. This was how patients at home tested too. I believe the tablet was some kind of very strong base.
We had more than a few patients swallow one by accident or design. If they didn’t die a horrible, painful death, they were unable to swallow ever again. Some burned their tongue so badly they lost the ability to speak.