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Comment by pfisherman | Hacker News Reader

The “might work” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. How strong must the evidence be for the hypothesis of efficacy to be considered reasonable?

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Why not leave that question to the person getting treated?

The person being treated, or their family, might change their mind after the treatment fails, and cry bloody murder. And get sympathy. So the only defense is to deny treatment. In hindsight, with the bad consequences fixed, they will claim they should have been prevented from getting the treatment and whoever did not prevent them is at fault.

Do you doubt there are people who refuse to accept the consequences of their own actions and seek to place blame anywhere else they can?

Or indeed some third party might do the claim with hindsight. Prosecutors or whatever. People can be irrational, in general.

Those all sound like legislative issues that could be fixed by the legislature enabling these kinds of experimental treatments in the first place.

I find this comment somewhat disingenuous. People have been arguing about allowing more experimental end of life treatments for at least 40 years of my life. I grew up during the AIDS crisis and there were all kinds of quacks selling this or that to take easy money from desperate people. If what you say is true, then why hasn't it already happened? After all, isn't 40+ years long enough to argue about it?

Because decades of arguing in no way implies that "the truth" or correct policy will fall out of politics. Abortion and marijuana legalization are two contemporary (and much more prominent) examples.

The legislative institutions are not isolated from the people. The opposite in fact, in democracy they must respond to the will of the people. So if enough people are irrational and wish to assign blame somewhere else after they assumed a certain risk (and/or enough people support this even when not involved), there can be no legislative solution.

It would require legislative bodies to pass laws against the wishes of the people. Maybe in China :)

Why not ask the scientist treating themself?

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