The question, then, is what does it take for something to become an accepted medical procedure? Being able to sense electrical fields and/or navigate like a pigeon seems like it would be marginally more useful than cosmetic surgeries like breast enhancement, and those are commonplace.
Well, this whole thing was started by a very enterprising electrician (Remember what I said about being able to sense if a wire is live or dead just by being near it? Yeah, very useful in electrical work.).
If I understand how it works correctly, all you would really have to do is apply it as an elective procedure to the FDA, do studies proving it is safe and effective enough to officially be on the market, and theoretically it will be fully legal for doctors to do. The problem is that this takes obscene amounts of money, and if it fails it weakens the legal status of it. The potential for failure is there, given the problems with neodymium, though it has been suggested that the broken seal problem could be solved by replacing the usual plastic composite with titanium or gold (as far as I know, nobody has ever actually tried either).
Yeah, but I'm guessing that having magnets in your fingertips can't be good for certain electronics. Or if you need an MRI for whatever reason.
As I said earlier, it isn't strong enough to damage electronics. So far, there have been exactly zero reports of hard drive wipes, or even credit card wipes, as a result of neodymium implants. They're small and inside your finger, you need more power than that.
I haven't heard any reports on MRI's actually harming anybody because of this, but that might be because it hasn't actually happened yet. Most people who get them just inform their doctors and have a notice on their record to keep the hand in question under lead during any MRIs.