Comment by isitmadeofglass
3 years ago
If we allowed any type of experimentation on dying patients as long as there was consent, dying patients would end up getting used as a Guineapigs by companies trying to get a lucky indication. It would certainly benefit the families left behind financially, but it would not be pretty. “Here’s a million bucks, please take these 40 drugs that will certainly kill you, but we’ll learn which one we should continue with”. And why even do toxicity studies or phase 1 and 2 trials? It’s cheaper to pay of poor people who are on the verge of dying and just pushing them over the edge.
The decision should be just because a patient and a doctor, because the consequences of such decisions are more far reaching than just those two. We have a well established framework for what a drug needs to prove before they can reasonable be allowed to be given to any human being, no matter their situation, and that barrier of entry is there for a multitude of good reasons. Discarding it just because a specific patient is at risk of dying or because you can get consent is not helping patients.
> It would certainly benefit the families left behind financially, but it would not be pretty.
You are very optimistic. Medics will sell expensive snake oil treatment to desperate families. For example, from the bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer#History
> In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of women who had successfully completed standard treatment then demanded and received high-dose bone marrow transplants, thinking this would lead to better long-term survival. However, it proved completely ineffective, and 15–20% of women died because of the brutal treatment.
> You are very optimistic. Medics will sell expensive snake oil treatment
I think you misunderstood. My point was that it would benefit the families because a company would gladly pay a million bucks to give a dying cancer patient the first human dose of 40 drugs they haven’t yet done any testing on, just to get quick human feedback.
The “patient” in that scenario won’t likely get any benefit from the money, but the family they leave behind would.
Obviously this is not something we want to actually see happening, but the cynic in me know that if a company can save billions by skipping all trials and going straight to “dying human” they will, and they’d be happy to pay the expendable subject a million or even more, they still come out net positive.
If I was dying I'd rather be able to make a choice to my benefit rather than worrying about that it'd "be pretty" for onlookers.
There are certain choices we as a society do not want to allow you to make even if both you and the other party concents. Just because your dying and for instance would be ok with being hunted for sport in a Netflix special in return for a million dollar payout to your family does not mean we should forgoe all morals, logic and law and just accept it.
Allowing dying patients to make those sorts of deals with pharmaceuticals is just as horrible in the grander scale of things, they just stand to save a lot more costs and gain a lot more profits than Netflix would in a “Running Man” scenario.
You might be able to make an informed decision. Most people (and most doctors, for that matter), are not qualified to accurately judge the many uncertainties, biases and trade-offs present in drugs only tested in early stage clinical trials.
And to add on top of that. If pharmaceuticals could buy out dying patients at a fraction of a cost of even the pre clinical trials to get first human dose there would no longer be such a thing as “early stage clinical trials”