Extended therapies, do they save lives?

[Guest guest]

This is from a cancer discussion and I picked up on it because Dr.

Sawyers ( I know some of you had or have him for their doctor) was asked for his

opinion about extending the life of patients with toxic drugs that only last a

few months. You can read the entire article, this is only a portion, but it

bears some thought if you are faced with the decision to take drugs to prolong

your life by a short margin of time. The focus here is on the enormous costs to

the governnment and the insurance companies. All life is valuable, but there

has to come a time when they will have to draw a line and not allow doctors to

continue to ply patients with these harsh drugs. Personally I don't want to

live that way, but there are people who fear death and want to prolong life at

any costs. How do you feel about this, I'd like to hear some responses from

others.

“With chemotherapy, you’re subjecting patients to a toxic treatment, and the

response rates are much lower, so it’s important to answer ‘Are you really

helping the patient?’ ” Sawyers, who chairs human oncology at

Sloan-Kettering, told the Times. “But with these drugs that have minimal side

effects and dramatic response rates, where we understand the biology, I wonder,

why do we have to be so rigorous? This could be one of those defining cases that

says, ‘Look, our system has to change.’ ”

" Roche was urged last year to seek accelerated approval. According to the Times

article, getting patients to join a trial for a drug already on the market was

unlikely, since the odds were only 50-50 that a patient would receive the med

and patients were already clamoring for the Roche treatment. And without the

trial, obtaining “definitive” effectiveness data was also unlikely. Yet the

trial would cost $100 million and FDA approval may have to wait 2 years, which

some docs felt was a waste when the important issue was prolonging remissions. "

Sorry, I had a mishap and lost my source.

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When I've asked each cancer patient who's come to consult me so far whether

there was a part of him or her which wanted to die, the answer was invariably

" yes " . They then proceeded to tell me a number of reasons why dying would indeed

be an easy way out. In such cases it's worth asking under what conditions the

patient could wholeheartedly start embracing their life again. The therapist's

task is to show the patient ways to arrange their life in such a fashion as to

make living worthwhile again.

Dr. Hans- Zimmermann translated by © Healing Cancer Naturally

http://tinyurl.com/2e6whl2

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CLINICAL TRIALS - SAVE LIVES NOW OR LATER

An excellent front-page story by Amy Harmon in Sunday's New York Times told a

heart-rending tale of two cousins. McLaughlin, 24, was given a promising

experimental drug to fight his life-threatening skin cancer in a clinical trial.

He called it his " superpill " and his melanoma receded. But his cousin,

, 22, had the bad luck of being assigned by computer lottery to the trial's

control group, receiving only standard chemotherapy. Even after the trial ended,

Roche, the company that is developing the new drug, refused to offer legally

permitted " compassionate access " to the drug to , apparently for fear of

distorting the survival statistics needed to get rapid FDA approval. died

in June, while McLaughlin is still taking the medication, known as PLX4032.

(More on Time.com: Childhood Cancer Has Its Gold-Ribbon Day)

http://tinyurl.com/29tudvc

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What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? by Atul Gawande

What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

by Atul Gawande (This was a very lengthy article that was rather morbid, so I

only posted this little saying that rang a bell with me.)

" Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and

bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal

patients have left. "

http://tinyurl.com/34k3ymt

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