The new Cortex phone app offers users the convenience of at-home neurosurgery – and at an average savings savings of over 95 percent.
“If you have to have brain surgery, where’s a better place than in the comfort of your own home?” says Sandy McClain, CEO of app developers XBam2. “Especially when it’ll only cost you $350!” This includes a $50 “Happy Recovery” gift certificate redeemable at 15 national restaurant chains.
Cortex works just like any other shared economy service: If you want to order brain surgery, you plug in the pertinent info – age, gender, type of surgery – and a Cortex rep will arrive at your home within 20 minutes, equipped with the necessary tools.
XBam2 began testing the app on last March in two markets – Newark, Ohio and Benton Harbor, Michigan. “On the average, we’re in and out in under an hour,” says McCain, who first gained notice in 2018 for the BlimK app that categorizes raisins 1,100 ways.
Not surprisingly, Cortex has drawn criticism from the Associated Institution of Neurosurgeons.
“My major complaint is that these people haven’t gone to medical school,” says the group’s president, Dr. Steven Durning. “So can you really trust them to operate on your brain?”
McClain dismisses such criticism. She says Cortex’s success rate is 87 percent – expected to hit 93 upon expansion into 500 more markets in January 2025 – and that a high school diploma makes a person more than qualified to perform in-home brain surgery.
“After all,” she says, “it’s not rocket science.”
