> what's the worst that can happen?
The patient dies from complications of the drug's use before the cancer.
The patient dies from complications of the drug's use before the cancer.
Big Pharma needs good data. And they have annoying FDAs/whatever-regulations-body slowing them down.
If you have a serious disease they might not mind you taking it. But if you have a serious disease plus your kidneys have already shutdown - w/e drug won’t save you. The death counts as a negative. “Let me take it anyway” well fine but it’s not some huge conspiracy.
Medical guidelines are there for a reason and are often, as they say in the military, "written in blood".
They aren’t going to know if it does that until they give it to a human in the first place. The only difference in giving it now is they lack a control group.
Still wouldn't let my loved ones try untested treatments though, especially if it buys only weeks of extra lifetime. The potential costs are too high.
you're not being creative enough.
I agree with compassionate use cases, but be creative here : some drugs can create deaths much more miserable than the controlled burn of a 6 month descent into hospice care surrounded by family and loved ones.
6 months to live versus a possible supportive drug regiment with the side effects being constant pain until you slowly bleed out through your eyes after total sensory lock-in -- easy a choice to make? not for me.
What if some weird interaction sensitizes your nerves, and you spend your last weeks in incredible pain, begging to die? Not only would that suck for you, it would, again, affect your loved ones. It would also cause distress to the nurses that cared for you and the doctor(s) that administered it to you; remember, they don't just have to convince you, they have to convince medical professionals that this wouldn't be violating their code of ethics.
Edit: and all of this is before the psychological implications of knowing your time is almost up. People would rather have burnt skin removed by a painful grinder than painless maggots because bugs and being eaten are so psychologically scarring most people won’t even consider it until they experience the pain of the flesh grinder work. People won’t think rationally anyways until it’s much too late.
My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.
That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.
If you've got a 95% chance of death, take the pain pills and enjoy your final days. Don't bankrupt yourself and spend more time miserable, dying anyways.
The parent comment suggested taking an experimental drug would mean they couldn’t give their children inheritance, implying that the government might seize your assets or something.
I firmly disagree with the “take the death” argument made here, but I do respect the intellectual integrity of committing to your argument at least, and suspect we just hold extremely different moral perspectives.
In the US, you pay like $350/year (assuming you’re, like, 30-ish?) for about a half million dollar policy.
By the time you’re 60, you shouldn’t need that payout anymore. You should have enough savings to cover your funeral, plus whatever retirement plan you had anyways to care for the probably-just-one dependent at that point.
I feel like you’re imagining that you take a magic drug which cures you and you go home happy. In reality, the drug will have severe side effects in every case, making your final days worse. The chances of it working are already incredibly low. It is a significantly more brutal lottery than scratch tickets could ever hope to be.
When you have almost no time left, you focus on quality. Visit people you haven’t seen enough, do things you wanted to do, say things you meant to say. Take some pain meds to get through the worst of it. Memento mori.
Imagina an evil bank clerk on the door of a cancer center that says:
fake quote> There is a new promising [unverified] treatment that can save the life of your S.O. It's very expensive so you have to take a double mortgage on your home. You are very lucky, because today we are offering it with only a 49.99% interest rate. Do you love him/her?