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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

>Problem is, there is no proof at all that aducanumab leads to any kind of improvement

Nothing you have said has any bearing on whether someone who is currently dying of Alzheimers should be allowed to try it if they or their doctors or family choose. "False hope" is not the most important thing at stake here, not by a long shot.

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Committing fraud against the most desperate, vulnerable people in the country is universally regarded as unethical.

But there is no fraud. As has been stated elsewhere in this thread, the drug claims to remove plaque, not to treat Alzheimers. I personally don't have the hubris to think I should stand in the way of someone willing to try the drug on their loved one who is suffering from Alzheimers.

This is an incredibly expensive treatment meant for incredibly desperate people. If you were in a situation where a parent had alzheimers it would be hard not to feel guilty if you didn't try it, no matter the price.

To approve the drug despite the lack of efficacy is unethical, especially considering there are potentially severe side effects like brain swelling.

except that financial resources are finite . Without certain standards, costs would spiral out of control more than they already have.

I am sympathetic to the argument that expensive treatments socialized medicine pays for should be limited to those proven effective. What I am against are blanket restrictions presumably for people's own good, or to prevent "Big Pharma" from profiting or whatever bugaboo it is.

We can create combinatorially many drugs. There are labs that can screen hundreds of thousands of molecules a day. So approving drugs that aren’t proven effective for a disease might reasonably lead to few or no drugs that are effective because it’s so easy and relatively cheap to stuff a development pipeline with promising drugs if you don’t need to worry about whether they work at the disease stage due to crowding out effective drugs.

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