Comment by matteoraso

>How often do these drugs, etc turn out to effective?

This is a big point a lot of people ignore. I feel terrible for the author, but if there hasn't been a single drug invented so far that has any real chance of curing him, it's extremely unlikely that this one out of reach drug is going to be the drug that can save his life. I don't really know much about medicine, but I'm pretty sure that progress is usually incremental as well, so you start out with drugs that cure some patients and work from there instead of having some massive breakthrough.